Here is a rule of thumb: as long as there are drug tests, there will be drug testers trying to get through the system by altered urine samples.

And when it comes to people trying to cheat a drug test, Butler County Detective Pat Cannon has seen it all — or so he thought.

"Just when I think I've seen every imaginable trick," he said, "I see something new."

Some are creative, he acknowledged. Some, not so much. Take for example the most recent attempted ruses this month.

Jeanetta Lynn Emmert, 31, of Middlesex Township on Tuesday came into the Butler County Probation office for a scheduled urine test. It didn't take long before she was caught cheating, authorities said.

While providing the sample, probation officer Christine Barnhart spotted a tube protruding from an area of the woman where no tube should be protruding.

Emmert, upon the officer's instruction, removed what was hidden, a blue aspirator.

"The aspirator was under her right arm pit," Cannon said.

He said attached to the aspirator was a tube that ran down her back and between her legs.

Dripping from the tube, the officer reported, was a liquid substance. It was another person's presumably clean urine.

A legitimate sample taken immediately after, according to court documents, tested positive for marijuana and a prescription sedative.

Emmert allegedly confessed to the homemade contraption. Her effort, albeit criminal, won Cannon's recognition.

""When I was interviewing (Emmert)," he said, "I told her, 'I'll give you points for ingenuity.' But it still didn't work."

A lesser try at beating the system came Sept. 2 when Jennifer Nina Perdue, 32, of Butler came in to give a required sample.

Again, Barnhart became suspicious, this time by what sounded like an unusual amount of liquid filling the sample cup.

The officer's suspicions only heightened when Perdue handed over the cup — which was "not warm at all," documents said.

Cold-busted, Perdue admitted that the sample cup contained pear juice, authorities said. She even went so far as to allegedly mix traces of Xanax and methadone in the juice.

Authorities said Perdue has legal prescription for those drugs, which she knew would be expected to be found in her sample.

She feared a legitimate sample, Cannon said, would have turned up signs of opiates, apparently from taking morphine tablets.

Cannon's assessment of Perdue's idea? "Pretty lame."

She and Emmert are both charged with furnishing drug-free urine, a third-degree misdemeanor.

County court records, meanwhile, show an increase in the number of such cases filed in 2008 and 2009 over prior years.

But Cannon doesn't believe the numbers mean that more people are trying to cheat on urine tests.

"It's because more people are getting caught," he said. "And our probation officers deserve the credit for that — they know what to look for.

"It's like everything else, with experience comes success."