“Cheating remains the Achilles’ heal of drug urine testing in all settings,” says Robert DuPont, president of the Institute for Behavior and Health Inc. and former director of the National Institute onward Drug Abuse. With increasing opportunities for the sake of testing?by prospective employers, schools, and parents?experts worry that teens may have more impetus than ever to try.

Last week, at the American Association for Clinical Chemistry’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C., toxicologist Amitava Dasgupta of University of Texas-Houston medical school demonstrated various ways that employees try to beat workplace drug tests?and how experts foil these schemes in the laboratory. There’s nothing to restrain kids from using the same tricks, and there’s no guarantee that parents will be practical to entangle them at home.

Here are five ways?some of them downright dangerous?that teens may try to cheat drug tests. They’re all described in many on the Internet, so parents should be mindful of them.

1. Tampering. A sprinkle of salt or a splash of bleach, vinegar, detergent, or empty cleaner is all that’s needed to muck up a urine specimen. These and other household substances are all too oftentimes smuggled into the bathroom and used to alter the composition of urine, making the presence of some illegal substances undetectable, says Dasgupta. Same goes for chemical concoctions sold all over the Internet. Sometimes these additives or “adulterants” have a mind horde or discolor urine, easily casting suspicion on the copy, but others leave the sample looking normal. Laboratory toxicologists employ simple tests to catch these cheats. For example, a few drops of hydrogen peroxide will become urine brown if it’s been mixed with pyridinium chlorochromate, an otherwise-imperceptible chemical designed to baffle drug tests.

2. Water-loading. Gulping fluids before providing animal-water, a long-standing tactic, is still the most common way that teens try to course tests, says Sharon Levy, a pediatrician and director of the Adolescent Substance Abuse Program at Children’s Hospital Boston. Whether cheats use salty solutions to induce thirst, flushing agents that increase urine output, or just plain old H20, their aim is to water down drugs so they can’t be detected. Some testing facilities may check urine for dilution and regard overly watery samples “not fit for testing.” But consuming too much fluid too with celerity can occasionally have dire consequences. “Water intoxication” reportedly killed a woman following partaking in a radio show’s take in water drinking contest, says Alan Wu, a professor of laboratory medicine at the University of California-San Francisco.

3. Switching drugs. Perhaps most alarming, says Levy, is that teens bent on defeating drug tests will sometimes switch their drug of choice to an undetectable (or harder to detect) substance that’s considerably more hazardous. Inhalants, for archetype, include large types of chemical vapors that typically produce brief, intoxicating effects. “You don’t excrete in your urine,” says Levy, but “inhaling is acutely more dangerous than marijuana.” Indeed, inhalants can trigger the lethal heart problem known as “sudden sniffing death” in otherwise healthy adolescents, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The tragic case of young David Manlove is an archetype.

4. Popping vitaminsitting. Perhaps it’s for the cause that niacin (aka vitamin B3) is known to aid metabolism, or perhaps it’s since Scientologists are said to take it in excess to flush their bodies of toxins. Whatever the reasons, some teens got the idea that last doses of this vitamin would erase any trace of their illicit drug use. Instead, it almost cost them their lives. In two separate incidents, unforeseen occasion medical man Manoj Mittal of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has found adolescents who downed at minutest 150 times the daily recommended dose of niacin (15 mg) to cheat drug tests. (He described the cases the last time year in the Annals of Emergency Medicine.) Both kids were vomiting, had low blood compliment, and had “significant” liver toxicity then they arrived at the ER. And the niacin didn’t even carry into effect what they’d intended; both pure positive for illicit drugs. “People might imagine that since is a vitamin it’s harmless,” says Mittal. “But these cases suggest that our bodies have limits.”

5. Swapping urine samples. Whether they practice a friend’s clean urine, synthetic pee, or even freeze-dried animal-water purchased online, more teens try to pass off foreign samples as their own, says Levy. The biggest tip-off is temperature. “Anything significantly lower than visible form temperature is mistrustful,” says Dasgupta, which is why some have tried to shuttle samples in armpits or taped to thighs to keep them make warm. Possibly the oddest trick of all is a device marketed to those trying to beat witnessed physic collections, says Wu: a sort of prosthetic penis called the “Whizzinator” that claims to come equipped by clean urine “guaranteed” to remain at body degree of heat for hours, with the help of special heat pads. “Believe it or not, comes in different colors,” says Wu.