What is a GC MS test?

Answer 1

Gas Chromatography/Mass Spectrometry is as close to being a perfect drug test as it's possible to get. It's done in a computerized machine. It turns the sample to a gas, directs the gas into a little tube, and analyzes the way the components of that gas array themselves in the tube. If I had a properly certified GC/MS unit sitting here and a sample of urine from a known drug user, I could tell it, "evaluate this for THC, cocaine, adulterants, amphetamine and methamphetamine, and PCP" and watch as the machine told me how much of each of those items it found in your sample. It does it all at once, rapidly--a GC/MS can evaluate a sample and produce a report in about a minute and a half--and extremely accurately. This machine is so accurate they have to set lower limits to the screens it does because it can detect weed you smoked weeks ago.

You can't hide from this machine. You can't use something like Urine Luck--that stuff kinda works with the dip stick tests because it produces a chemical that can fool the stick, sometimes, but if you test the same sample on a GC/MS the machine will report the presence of THC and Urine Luck, and then you're doubly screwed--they get you for smoking weed AND for tampering with evidence. If you know you are going to face this machine the only way you can pass the test is to not use drugs. Simple as that.

GC/MS has one problem: it's very expensive. Remember that little tube I told you about? They use a new one for every test, and they're not cheap. The machine isn't cheap, and neither is the operator. They can run thirty dip stick tests for the price of one GC/MS test. This naturally means the lab only wants to put samples they KNOW are hot into the GC/MS, so all GC/MS programs use feeder systems called immunoassays, of which there are three: enzyme-multiplied immunoassay technique, or EMIT; enzyme-linked immunosorbent array, or ELISA; and radioimmunoassay, or RIA--EMIT is the most common, though. ELISA can be used for drug prescreening, but the machines are way more expensive than EMIT units. If you've got a lab that runs a lot of AIDS tests (ELISA is mostly used for HIV) you'd run drug feeder on the ELISA because you've already got the machine, but if you're mostly a drug lab you'd use EMIT. Anyway, they test all the samples on the EMIT unit because it's cheap, and put all the positives in the GC/MS for confirmation.

The moral of this story: if you use drugs and apply for a job to an employer that uses GC/MS testing, you won't get hired no matter what you try.

So dont use drugs without doctors persription.

Answer 2

GC/MS is the drug test you cannot beat. If you know you're up against a GC/MS, don't even try.

It stands for Gas Chromatograph/Mass Spectrometer. The machine does two tests, as its name implies.

The first is the gas chromatograph. There's a glass tube with a strip of a special gel in it. They heat some of the sample and send the steam into the tube. Each of the chemicals in the sample will rise at a different rate.

The second is the mass spectrometer. This instrument ionizes the chemicals in the sample, and separates the ions based on their mass to charge ratios. These data can be used to determine the exact identity of substances in exceedingly low concentrations

One beauty of GC/MS is it can tell you exactly what a bad person you've been. Maybe you have a prescription for Tylenol 3--acetaminophen with codeine. Codeine is an opiate, so if you shove heroin and I test you with a dip-stick test kit, you'll come up hot for opiates but you've got an alibi in your pocket--your Tylenol 3 prescription--so you pass. If I put the same sample in a GC/MS it is going to tell me you're doing smack, which you don't have a prescription for. It can also detect adulteration. There are a LOT of people here asking about certo, suregel, urine luck, just hundreds of different products. Put adulterated pee in a GC/MS and it will print out: I found THC, cocaine, suregel, CarboClear, too much water...the only thing it cannot measure is sample temperature for the obvious reason--by the time it gets to the lab, it's cooled to room temperature. (New specimen cups have thermometers on them for that reason.)

There's an old joke about a man who heard of a machine at the mall that can diagnose disease. Pour in some pee, insert $20 and it will give you a complete physical. He went down there, tried it and got a printout: "You have tennis elbow. Put ice on it for a week." Impressed, he decided to see just how good it was so he went home, got his wife, son, daughter and dog to pee in it, dropped in a cat turd, masturbated in the jar and went back to the mall. He dumped it in, put in his $20 and got back this readout: "Your wife's pregnant with another man's child, your daughter has VD, your son smokes weed, your dog has fleas, your cat has worms and if you don't quit jerking off your tennis elbow's never going to go away." That's GC/MS.

There are some problems with GC/MS, and they all have dollar signs attached. First, the machine is outrageously expensive. A USED GC/MS is on the wrong side of $50,000. A new one? $75,000 and up. This is for a tabletop one you can test only a few samples per hour on. The ones the big labs like LabCorp's confirmation lab in North Carolina have are worth a few million dollars, but they can test about a thousand samples per day and they're set up to run a lot of test protocols--if you've got a multimillion-dollar box you're running everything in the world on it from drugs to diseases.

Answer 3

Everything.