Can you cheat on drug and alcohol tests and get away with it?

Part one: How alcohol testing works.

The short answer to that often asked question; “Can you cheat on drug and alcohol tests and get away with it?” is probably not. And it’s especially hard to do it if at all with DOT drug screening or alcohol testing here’s why.

The DOT mandated testing methods that are hard to beat and made it even harder over the years.

Most dot alcohol tests are breath alcohol testing using evidential breath testing equipment. Testing with non evidential breath testing devices and saliva alcohol testing are also allowed by the regulations much less used because they are only allowed for initial screening but not for confirmation testing if an initial screen is a positive requiring a confirmation test.

There are also time requirements so even if you tested using screening devices you’ll still need to have evidential breath testing equipment nearby in order to stay in compliance if a positive initial screen need a confirmation test now.

In general there are many reliable ways that I know of to be any type of alcohol testing. They all look for the presence of alcohol in your system and measure it as a blood/alcohol concentration (BAC) in your blood.

• Saliva alcohol testing looks at alcohol present in the saliva
• Breath alcohol tests convert breath from your deep lungs where alcohol is releasing into your lungs where the blood and the air you breath come together. That alcohol is converted into energy and that is used to measure the blood/alcohol concentration (BAC) level.

In summary while there are some ways to cheat a drug screen there aren't any ways to cheat an alcohol test that I can think of unless you can substitute someone else’s saliva or breath and not have the alcohol testing tech not notice. Not likely. Alcohol testing techs are required to have very specific DOT approved certified alcohol tech training to follow a strict protocol for conducting tests so I wouldn't count on any gaming the tech strategies unless they were in on it too-again this being real live that’s not likely to happen either.