Electrochemical analysis of speedball-like polydrug samples

Abstract

Increasing global production, trafficking and consumption of drugs of abuse cause an emerging threat to people’s health and safety. Electrochemical approaches have proven to be useful for on-site analysis of...

Interpol Review of Drug Analysis 2019-2022

“…2020 solutions for the selective electrochemical analysis for the detection of cocaine in speedball-like polydrug samples adulterated with heroin and codeine [ 821 ]; review of electrochemical detection of illicit drugs (such as cocaine, heroin, and (meth)amphetamine), their precursors and derivatives in different matrices [ 822 ]; an approach to identify and estimate the purity of white powders as amphetamine, cocaine, ketamine or others using spectroscopic techniques hyphenated with partial least squares (PLS) modelling [ 823 ]; electron ionization (EI) and electrospray ionization (ESI) high-resolution mass spectrometry fragmentation pathways and characteristic ions of 25 novel fentanyl analogues and 5 novel synthetic opioids to provide a reference for the identification of these compounds [ 651 ]; 2021 UHPLC-MS/MS method to determine the designer benzodiazepines (clonazolam, deschloroetizolam, nifoxipam, flubromazolam and meclonazepam), and the Z-hypnotics (zolpidem, zaleplon and zopiclone) [ 824 ]; an ultrasonic cutter-assisted non-thermal desorption (non-TD) method for ultra-trace level detection of different types of nonvolatile compounds such as drugs of abuse, explosives, pharmaceuticals, spinosad, cholesterol, rhodamine B, glucose and amino acids [ 825 ]; HR-EIS-QTOF-MS comparison study of in-source versus beam-type collision-induced dissociation for fentanyl analogues and synthetic cathinones [ 826 ]; ATR-FTIR method used with PCA, Fisher discriminant analysis (FDA), and K nearest neighbor analysis (KNN) to develop a method for differentiating barbiturates, benzodiazepines, and phenothiazines [ 827 ]; H-1 and F-19 NMR spectroscopy method for the dection, discrimination and quantification of amphetamine, cathinone and nor-ephedrine regioisomers [ 828 ]; validated UHPLC-ESI-MS/MS method for determination of 19 psychoactive substances, including nine amphetamine-type stimulants and 10 synthetic cathinone derivatives [ 829 ]; review of the research on chiral separation of amphetamines, ketamine, cathinones [ 830 ]; 2022 Comparison of two seized drug workflows for the analysis of synthetic cannabinoids, cathinones, and opioids that includes color tests for screening with GC-FID and GC-MS analyses for confirmation verus DART-MS screening with class-specific (targeted) GC-MS [ 831 ].…”

Real‐time electrochemical screening of cocaine in lab and field settings with automatic result generation

“…Moreover, electrochemical approaches are generally inexpensive. Previous research has highlighted the potential of electrochemical approaches in illicit drug detection, mainly based on carefully developed voltammetric approaches to detect both illicit drugs and their cutting agents, either separately or simultaneously, albeit predominantly in laboratory settings 12–25 …”

“…Previous research has highlighted the potential of electrochemical approaches in illicit drug detection, mainly based on carefully developed voltammetric approaches to detect both illicit drugs and their cutting agents, either separately or simultaneously, albeit predominantly in laboratory settings. [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25] The foremost obstacle preventing the (commercial) use of electrochemical devices in the field is that customs personnel and other fieldworkers do not possess the necessary electrochemical knowledge to interpret the output data. To tackle this, our group developed a research line concerning an algorithm, with the purpose of bringing electrochemical methods closer to society.…”