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From: A Mayer, MD (Elmwood Industrial)
Password: orange
Date: 01 Sep 2009
Time: 10:39:27 -0700
Remote Name: 68.157.202.3
Does anyone have experience with people claiming their positive drug screen for cocaine is related to Amoxil (amoxicillin)use. There is an article from the Journal of Analytical Toxicology 32:315-318, May 2008 entitled "Failure of Amoxicillin to Produce Flase-Positive Urine Screens for Cocaine Metabolite" (abstract copied below).
Any help or input would be appreciated. The Internet is full of blogs and comments related to this issue.
Department of Community Health and Family Medicine, University of Florida Health Science Center, Jacksonville, Florida, USA.
Amoxicillin has been causally linked in the lay and medical literature to false-positive urine drug screens for cocaine metabolites. An exhaustive search of the peer-reviewed medical literature revealed no data to support this link. We hypothesized that amoxicillin does not cause false-positive urine drug screens for cocaine metabolites. To test this hypothesis, we examined the urine of 33 subjects administered a course of amoxicillin, subjecting the specimens to four common urine screening immunoassays. Thirty-one specimens were negative for the cocaine metabolite, benzoylecgonine (BE), by all four screening methods; two were positive for BE by all four screening methods. Both positive specimens were confirmed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) for the presence of BE at > 150 ng/mL. Three specimens that screened negative, but produced absorbance values that were intermediate between negative and positive controls, were submitted for GC-MS analysis; BE was detected in all three specimens at concentrations of 54, 94, and 119 ng/mL. Twenty-eight specimens produced screening results indistinguishable from negative controls. Within the limitations of the study design, we conclude that amoxicillin is unlikely to produce false-positive urine screens for cocaine metabolites.