How Long Does Benzodiazepine Stay In Your System? Timeline & Factors

“How Long Does Benzodiazepine Stay In Your System?” You are searching for this question, and it cannot be just out of curiosity. There has to be a specific reason behind this search. You might be an athlete approaching a drug test for a tournament you are about to play and you are worried that you might flunk the test just because you took some Benzos for your insomnia previously. Or you might be someone preparing for a job that requires you to take a drug test. Or it could just be some medical reasons. Either way, you will find all your answers right here, as in this article, we are going to learn about exactly that. But before we get to that, let’s first see what is a benzodiazepine?

What is Benzodiazepine & How Does It Work?

Benzodiazepines, more well-known by the name of “benzos,” are a class of sedative-hypnotic drugs used to treat seizures, anxiety, alcohol withdrawal and insomnia. It belongs to the drug class of CNS depressants. How does benzodiazepine work exactly? How can it help anxiety? Well, they boost your GABA. Increase chloride channel opening, which inhibits brain activities. Making you feel all calm and relaxed. They target regions like the cerebral cortex, causing sedation, and the limbic system, and reducing anxiety in the process. In short, they hyperpolarise your neurons, which makes them very less likely to fire, which in result reduces brain activity.  

Many short-term used Benzodiazepines, such as alprazolam (Xanax), clonazepam (Klonopin), lorazepam (Ativan), diazepam (Valium), are FDA-approved medicines to treat conditions mentioned previously. Even so, getting caught on a drug test can be risky if you do not have a proper medical prescription. In such cases, you might wonder, How long does benzodiazepine stay in your system for drug test? Well, it all comes down to the half-life of the benzo.

Half-Life Of Benzodiazepine 

The half-life of a drug is the time it takes for the concentration of a drug to reduce by half of its original concentration inside your body. If a benzo has 5 hours as its half-life, that means after 5 hours, only half of the drug’s original percentage will be lost in your body. After about another 5 hours, half of that remaining amount will be used and this process goes on until the drug is completely wiped out of your system. Benzodiazepines are divided into three groups based on their half-life: short-acting (1-12 hrs), intermediate-acting (12-40 hrs) and long-acting (40-250 hrs). Well, this depends a lot on the metabolism of the consumer and age also plays a big role in this. The older you are, the longer benzo will stay in your system.

How long a drug stays in your blood differs from how long it can stay in your urine and saliva. Let’s see how long it can actually stay in our bodies.

How Long Does Benzodiazepine Stay In Your System

For the question “How many days do benzos stay in your system?” the answer will be different depending on which drug test we are actually talking about. Because the elimination time differs from blood to urine to saliva to hair. 

How Long Do Benzos Stay In Your Blood?

Blood drug tests aren’t very common when it comes to detecting Benzos. But they can be very accurate, especially if done in the first 24 hours after taking the drug. That is because Benzodiazepine can last in your bloodstream for about 12 to 24 hours. This isn’t much of a worry though, as the practice is not very common in workplace scenarios and is only done in hospitals by a medical professional, and that too when the dosage is prescribed, and the doctor wants to see if it is actually working on you.

How Long Does Benzodiazepine Stay In Your Urine?

Now, urine is the most common drug test conducted all over the world, and this is where things get a little tricky. Up to 10 days, yes, that’s right, Benzodiazepine detected in your urine up to 10 days, well, that’s for the long-acting benzos, for intermediate-acting ones, it’s about 1 to 5 days, and at last, short-acting benzos can only last about 24 hours. If you have become a regular abuser of the medicine, then it can come up in the urine test even after 30 days of the last dosage. 

How Long Do Benzos Stay In Your Saliva?

Swab tests are very common when the intention is to detect recent use of benzodiazepines. Benzos can last in your saliva for up to 2 days. Swab tests are a more common practise when it comes to workplace testing or treatment monitoring, as they are the easiest way for drug testing. 

How Long Do Benzos Stay In Your Hair?

This is where benzos last the longest, up to about 90 days. That’s right, a single strand of your hair can hold on to Benzodiazepine for about 90 days. This happens because, as your hair grows longer, a minute trace of benzo in your bloodstream becomes incorporated into your hair. 

Well, all of these numbers can be variables, because not everyone’s body functions in the same way, and there are multiple factors that affect how long does 1 benzodiazepine stay in your system. 

Factors That Affect Benzodiazepines’Duration

Human bodies are not the same; every human being differs from each other. And so several different factors play a role in how long does benzodiazepine stay in your system. 

Some major factors are:

• Age
• Kidney function
• Liver function
• Dosage 
• Frequency 
• Individual metabolism 
• Using other medications 
• Method of injection 

These are some of the most common factors that affect how long that benzo will last in your system. 

Benzodiazepine Addiction 

Benzodiazepines are controlled substances, which means they are really easy to get addicted to and build a dependency. Some common symptoms of Benzodiazepine Addiction may look like:

• Blurred vision 
• Mood changes
• Drowsiness
• Weakness
• Poor judgement

And like every other substance addiction ever, if you try to stop taking benzos all of a sudden, you will be hit with withdrawal effects. While quitting the addiction is a tough thing to do, it can make easy with strong willpower and a little support from Benzodiazepine addiction treatment.

Conclusion 

The length of Benzodiazepine in a human’s body depends on several different factors and can vary from person to person. The longest-acting Benzodiazepine can last in your system for about 11 days, so if you need to take a test, wait for 10 to 11 days, and the results will be just fine. One thing to remember is that, sometimes, if you are on other medications (like zoloft), which have a similar chemical metabolism to benzo, can flag a false positive for Benzodiazepine.