25 Feb How Long Does Suboxone Stay In Your System?

If you’ve ever dealt with an alcohol or drug addiction, then you know that addiction is a lifelong disease that millions of people struggle with every day. In some cases, addiction can be so strong that to get clean, a person has to be given another substance to slowly come off of a drug they were using and to counteract the effects that the original drug was causing. In the case of opioid addiction, the drug Suboxone – a name brand of the drug Naloxone – is used to inhibit opioids’ effects on a person’s body, slowly allowing them to become less dependent. How long does Suboxone stay in your system, though?

Suboxone half-life

The half-life of a drug refers to how long it takes for half of a dose of a substance to leave the bloodstream and no longer be detectable in the user. In the case of Suboxone, it has an unusually long half-life of 37 hours. This means that for one full dose of Suboxone to leave a person’s body, it would take approximately eight days.

This also only refers to the drug’s half-life when it is checked via a blood test. When testing urine, the time it stays detectable could be even longer, and in the case of a hair follicle test, there can be trace amounts of the drug found months later.

Testing for suboxone

There is one particular caveat for testing for the drug Suboxone. Because it is a semi-synthetic opioid, it does not show up on a standard drug test. However, it is possible for it to show up on a more specialized drug test or when a person to be tested specifically for that drug. This means that if a person were to be tested for Suboxone specifically, the bare minimum amount of time that would need to pass for it not to be detectable is greater than eight days.