Evaluation of drug identification and discrimination ability of portable spectrometers

Abstract

We have evaluated the identiˆcation and diŠerentiation abilities of three portable spectrometers (TruNarc: Raman spectrometer, Target-ID: infrared spectrometer, NIRSCAN-MKII: near-infrared spectrometer) for on-site drug screening.Identiˆcation abilities were evaluated using samples containing methamphetamine (MA) and cocaine (COC), including case samples and mixtures of these drugs with diluents. DiŠerentiation ability was evaluated using case samples that did not contain MA or COC and compounds having similar chemical structures to MA and a-pyrrolidinovalerophenone (a-PVP).All three spectrometers commonly showed acceptable true-positive rates (93.2  to 96.6) for the MA-containing case samples. In addition, their true-positive