Last year, Rachel Murphy, a 36-year-old entertainment industry publicist in New York and mother of a toddler, temporarily gave up her nightly weed habit a week before taking a required urine test to secure a life-insurance policy. (She only smokes once her daughter is in bed.) Hours after the exam, she lit up. Two days later, the clinic called to say there was a glitch in the test (unrelated to drugs) and that she would have to retake it. "I was totally back on this bandwagon of smoking a lot, and I didn't want to be bothered to have to do this again," Murphy says. With three days until the test, she frantically called her cousin, an insurance agent herself, who advised Murphy to buy Ready Clean, a 16-ounce fruit punch that claims to flush out the THC in urine if ingested within 48 hours of a drug test. Rachel paid $50 and had the drink overnighted. "My husband was standing over me the morning of the test saying, 'Drink! Drink! Chug it!' I was like, 'I can't drink that fast.' He said, 'Rachel, this is serious s---. We need life insurance—we have a baby—and we can't get it because my wife smokes pot?'" One agonizing week later, Murphy got the word that she'd passed her urine test.
The white-knuckle experience became a major source of tension in her marriage, Murphy concedes, so she stopped smoking for a while. But it didn't last. "I'm sorry, but I have a stressful job, I have a baby. I need to unwind somehow, and I don't really like to drink," she grumbles.
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