Have you taken Dilaudid recently or are planning on taking it and have questions? How long does Dilaudid stay in your system? What’s the half life of Dilaudid? Is there a difference between Dilaudid and hydromorphone? How long does hydromorphone stay in your system?
In this guide, we go over all your questions about Dilaudid, including how soon after taking Dilaudid you can pass a drug test, the type of drug test most common for Dilaudid, and what you can do to help pass your drug test.
What Is Dilaudid?
Dilaudid is a brand name for the drug hydromorphone. Dilaudid is an opiod pain medication (also known as a narcotic) used to treat moderate to severe pain. Dilaudid is about two to eight times more potent than morphine. Like other opioids, Dilaudid alters the way your brain feels and responds to pain in order to make the pain more manageable. Some people also use Dilaudid recreationally in order to get high.
Dilaudid comes in liquid or tablet form taken orally as well as an injectable liquid. Most doses are between 1mg and 10mg.
How Long Does Dilaudid Stay in Your System?
Dilaudid begins to work about 30 minutes after you take it in tablet form or after five minutes if you inject it. Its effects last about two to four hours. How long does Dilaudid stay in your system? The Dilaudid half life is 4.1 hours, similar to the half-lives of many other opiates. This means that, after about four hours, half the Dilaudid you originally took will have been metabolized and removed from your system and about half will remain in your body. Exactly how long Dilaudid stays in your system depends on multiple factors. We discuss these more in the next section.
In the chart below, you can see how long detectable levels of Dilaudid remain for four different drug tests.
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Test
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How Long Detectable Levels Remain
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Saliva
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1-4 days |
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Blood
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Up to 1 day |
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Urine
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3-4 days |
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Hair
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Up to 90 days
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Urine tests are the most common way to test for Dilaudid and other opioids. How long does Dilaudid stay in your urine? After taking the drug, detectable levels of Dilaudid will stay about 3-4 days in your urine, about a day in your blood, and about 1-4 days in your saliva. Similar to many other drugs, detectable levels of Dilaudid remain in your hair for about three months after last taking it.
What Affects How Long Dilaudid Stays in Your System?
It’s impossible to predict how long Dilaudid stays in your system since there are many factors that affect how quickly your body metabolizes and removes it. Exactly how long is Dilaudid in your system? In this section we discuss the three most important factors that affect it.
Your History of Narcotic Use
The biggest factor that determines how long Dilaudid stays in your system is your history of using narcotics and opioids. If you’ve used narcotics heavily or for a long time, whether recreationally or because you had a prescription, they will stay in their system longer. For particularly heavy users, Dilaudid can show up in blood and urine tests up to several weeks after you last took the drug. When you take opioids for a long period of time, they begin to build up in your body. This means it takes longer for them to be completely removed from your system and for you to get clean drug test results.
The Type of Dilaudid You Take
The type of Dilaudid you take also affects how long it stays in your system. Most people who take Dilaudid recreationally take it by swallowing or snorting regular Dilaudid pills. If you take the liquid version of Dilaudid, it goes through your body faster, so you can expect Dilaudid to have cleared your system for the shorter time periods in the above chart, about one day or less for saliva and blood tests and about three days for urine tests.
There are also extended-release versions of Dilaudid pills, and these are designed to stay in your system slightly longer than regular Dilaudid pills, about several days for blood and saliva tests and up to a week for urine tests. The type of Dilaudid you take won’t have much of an impact on how long detectable levels of the drug remain in your hair, so the timeline for hair tests remains the same for all of them.
Your Age and Weight
Younger people generally have faster metabolisms, which means their bodies will process substances, including Dilaudid, faster and remove them from their system faster. This means they can often pass a drug test faster than older people who have slower metabolisms.
Your weight can affect how long Dilaudid stays in your system. The more of the drug you take in comparison to your BMI (body mass index), the slower it’ll be removed from your system. This means that if a smaller person and a larger person take the same amount of Dilaudid, the drug will likely remain in the body of the larger person for a shorter period of time.
How Can You Get Dilaudid Out of Your System Faster?
What if you’ve recently taken Dilaudid, but you have a drug test soon that you need to pass? Since it’s an opioid, Dilaudid is one of the drugs almost all major drug tests check for. Unfortunately, there’s no guaranteed way to pass your drug test if you’ve taken Dilaudid recently. The best way to ensure clean test results is to avoid Dilaudid for at least four days (and ideally a week) before the test.
However, if you don’t know when your drug test will be and take Dilaudid regularly, you can try drinking more water than usual to try and flush Dilaudid out of your system more quickly. This is definitely not guaranteed to work, and if you’ve taken Dilaudid just a few hours before your drug test it won’t magically help you pass the test. However, if you’re on the edge of the time period for passing or not passing, drinking more water can give your body a bit of a push to get the last of the Dilaudid out of your system. Don’t start chugging gallons of water though, since that can make you sick. One to two glasses of water a day or two before your drug test is enough.
We also don’t recommend that you try any of the products out there that “guarantee” a clean drug test. Most of these don’t work, and some of them can even make you sick because of the strange ingredients they contain. As we mentioned above, the best way to pass your drug test is to avoid Dilaudid for a few days before the test.