joker, good post. I haven't been as active on this board the past couple of week as I would have liked, but I haven't seen the "... posts about how dilution never works ..." you refer to. There are 2 dilution guideline post, mine and S2's, stickied to the top of the main board and while I must say that I personally feel you were 'lucky' to pass with just 36 hours clean, I do believe you and that dilution is a viable weapon in this insane drug war. There are, as I see it, 2 drawbacks to dilution. 1 is that if you are a daily user, it is very common to have cannibiloid counts that are so high that they can not be diluted down to under the testing cutoff levels. Let me also inject here that a drug 'screen' (EMIT) cutoff level of 50ng/ml, that is screening out all 31 cannabis metabolites is roughly equall to a drug 'test' (GC/MS) cutoff level of 15ng/ml for the single cannabis metabolite THCA/THC-COOH. 2nd is the problem with a 'dilute' result for the urine validity check. As per DOT testing regulations, "As a laboratory you must consider the primary specimen to be dilute if the creatinine concentration is less than 20 mg/dL and the specific gravity is less than 1.003,...". (http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/rulesregs/fmcsr/regs/40.htm) Statisticly, according to the US gov study on water loading, "A high percentage of participants -- 75% of all participants -- were able to produce at least one low or 'dilute' specimen during the testing process", and over all "113 out of 500 specimens (22.6%) made it into the dilute range...".(http://www.dot.gov/ost/dapc/main/waterloading.pdf)
Given these facts, myself and others on this board 'recomend' substitution as the primary way to pass any non observed drug test. Simply because with substituting a clean sample, you will pass without any concern about when you last used or what your creatinine and specific gravity levels are.
Again, dilution works and works well, but not as well as substitution. Plain and simple. N2