Dr. Bill,

I'm impressed with your willingness to answer everyone's questions, and I'll thank you in advance for mine... I just went and did my intake and previously knew without a doubt I'd have four months of alcohol abuse treatment and decided to have a good weekend before I quit. Previous to going in today (5/5/2011) I had 9 beers and 3 glasses of wine (kind of an all day event golfing and such) that was on Sunday 5/01/2011, then nothing at all until Tuesday night 5/3/2011 and had two large glasses of wine. So again today, Thursday 5/5/2011) I took a test and the name brand was STATcup, I pissed in it, brought it back to the girl, and she says right away within less than 2 minutes of me peeing... Oh that's good. I questioned her and she said nothing shows up! Then I questioned her not even alcohol? She says no, why did you drink? I responded that I had over the weekend because I'm not in counseling YET! She responded by saying, "in that case I need to send it to the lab, but in your case, after speaking with the counselor, I'm not going to" I know long story sorry, but my questions are this: This STATcup test, is it an immediate ETG test or does that happen at a lab? I can do the 4 months of not drinking, however I'd like to know if I could and get away with it say 5 days previous to my one night that they could test me? Again thanks in advance

StatCup is a multi-drug immediate test (point of collection). It tests for, amongst other drugs, alcohol (ethanol) only and will detect down to .02 BAC. It does not test for EtG which is a longer lasting metabolite of ethanol.

Most programs requiring abstinence use EtG testing. Perhaps at intake they were simply checking for systemic alcohol.

There are EtG immunoassays available that can be used on-site but any positive would have to be confirmed at a laboratory by GC/MS or equivalent.

You're not alone in the one last fling. Very common. So that may be the reason for the alcohol screen.

Planning ways around the impositions of treatment are also common and I imagine the remainder of the tests will probably be EtG and unscheduled. Nonetheless, at five days you can probably beat the system but that seems a bit of a waste if you are in treatment.

No one can keep you from drinking if that is what you want to do but since you are going to restrict your drinking anyway I'd recommend just going along with the program for the 4 months and see how that plays out.