How Long Does Cocaine Stay In Your System?

How long can cocaine use be detected in your system?

Cocaine can stay in your for system up to three days, and can be detected using different methods, including by urine tests.

What Is Cocaine?
Cocaine in a highly-addictive substance derived from the South American cocoa plant. It can be injected, snorted, or rubbed on the inside of the mouth. 

Depending on the method used, the outcome may vary as a result of how the cocaine affects that part of the body.

You can check for cocaine by taking a urine, blood, saliva, sweat or hair follicle test.

How Do They Test For Cocaine, And For How Long Can Each Method Detect The Drug?

• A urine test can detect even the slightest amount of cocaine in your system. How quickly it will show up will depend on how you took the drug.  It commonly takes anywhere between four and 10 hours to detect if you snorted the cocaine, whereas if it was injected, it can show up after 20 hours or more. In certain methods of testing, it would take up to a month.

• A blood test varies in time as well, and can show cocaine traces within minutes of a person taking it, up to hours after the initial ingestion. Although expensive, blood tests are most common, as they are most accurate in a short amount of time.

• The least expensive test is the hair follicle test. Its other benefits are that it’s non-invasive to the patient, and a large quantity can be taken for further tests - should there be a need to do so. The detection period for this particular test varies from as much as a month to as little as eight hours.

• The quickest method is the saliva test, which may be administered right after the person has snorted the drug. The result, however, can take up to two days.

• The sweat patch test can be taken up to four hours after initial drug use. However, this test is the least favoured by doctors, due to its unreliability and margin for error.

Cocaine is tested for drug addiction because it is included among five drugs to be tested.

A single dose of cocaine can be tested in blood for 24 hours, in urine for 2-4 days in the case of normally-functioning kidneys, and for 90 days in a hair follicle test.

As you smoked cocaine on Thursday and your urine test is scheduled on Tuesday - which means 5 days gap - you can be tested negative if your kidneys are normal.

The half-life of cocaine is 90-180 minutes, which means it will be eliminated from body within 6 hours. But the cocaine has other active metabolite, which have its own elimination life.

The single dose of cocaine will be eliminated from body after 3 days - but it will take 100 days to get out from hair follicles.

Most likely it won't show up. Usually you need to be a regular user for it to show on a hair follicle test. Small amounts and only 1 time using normally don't show up.

It takes 2 weeks for the drug used to show up in your hair. After that, it stays in your hair for months, even years, depending on length of hair. Most hair follicle tests go back 90 days and cocaine use will show up.

Cocaine is actually benzoylmethyl ecgonine, which is a crystalline tropane alkaloid. It is obtained from the leaves of the coca plant. Cocaine can work as a stimulant of the central nervous system. It also works as a suppressant of the appetite. Cocaine is addictive by nature, however it has numerous medical uses especially as a topical anesthetic.

The time period for which drug stays in the human system is dependent on a number of factors. The age, weight, eating habits, water consumption, body metabolism etc all affect the stay of the system.

Hair follicles are one part of the body where the drugs stay for the longest. They are normally out of the urine in a few days and out of the blood after few weeks, however, they can stay in the hair follicles for as long as six weeks.

Cocaine is normally detectable in the hair follicles for 3-4 months on average. However, the longest duration for which they can be detectable in the hair follicles is 6 months. There are even cases, in which cocaine was detected in the hair follicles after 25 years. So one must be very careful.

Cocaine is a narcotic and addictive and can be tested positive in a drug test for employment. If you have normal kidney function, then it can be tested positive for 2-4 days in urine, 24 hours in blood and 90 days in hair follicles. This is about light or occasional users like you. So, you might be tested positive.