Preventing misidentification of 25I-NBOH as 2C-I on routine GC–MS analyses

Abstract

25I-NBOH is a novel psychoactive substance (NPS) recently reported to have been found on blotter paper samples seized on the streets of Brazil, used as a replacement for the NBOMes now scheduled in many countries. The presence of this NPS on the street market may go undetected because the most widely and routinely utilised analytical technique for drug sample analyses is gas chromatographymass spectrometry (GC-MS), which can misidentify 25I-NBOH (and indeed the other members of the NBOH series), because of its degradation into 2C-I (and corresponding 2C for the other members of the series) within the injector, unless a derivatization procedure is employed, which is often non-standard. While direct detection of 25I-NBOH under routine GC conditions is still to be achieved, slight adjustments in standard GC methods, including shortening of the solvent delay window, enabled the detection of an additional peak containing 25I-NBOH degradation product's fragmentation ions. Consequently, this secondary early chromatographic peak allowed for the distinction between 25I-NBOH and 2C-I using routine GC-MS without resorting to derivatization (or other analytical processes), thus preventing misidentification of 25I-NBOH as 2C-I. Keywords 25I-NBOH • 2C-I • NPS • Misidentification • Thermal degradation • GC-MS

Identification of new NBOH drugs in seized blotter papers: 25B-NBOH, 25C-NBOH, and 25E-NBOH

“…5) were all similar but they had no reasonable match on MS libraries currently. These results have already been predicted for other NBOHs corroborating the finding that this group of substances are thermolabile under the GC temperature conditions [16]. Considering the results of mass spectrum libraries and the presence of secondary peaks, there was an indication that substances 01, 02 and 03 were 25E-NBOH, 25C-NBOH, and 25B-NBOH, respectively.…”

“…The thermal fragmentation reactions and proposed mass fragmentation pathways for these substances are presented in Fig. 6 according to the previous works [16,24].…”

“…Together with usual difficulties associated with the identification of NPS (unknown substance, never before reported, not present in reference spectral libraries, no certified standards available, etc), detection of NBOHs present yet another important trait: thermal degradation under standard gas chromatography, which seriously increases the risk of misidentification [15,16] and demands the development of other detection methods [17][18][19][20][21].…”

New psychoactive substances detected at the New Zealand border, 2014–2018

“…However, the presence of 2C-I is these samples can be attributed to the thermal lability and subsequent breakdown of 25I-NBOH in the GC-MS injection port, and were therefore not considered to be originally present in the samples. 15,16 The four samples with incorrect package labeling were all identi- Comparable to UNODC and other reporting, synthetic cathinones, phenethylamines, and synthetic cannabinoids constituted the majority of new substances reported, with a comparatively small number of tryptamines, aminoindanes, and piperazines. 1,18,22,23 The WEDINOS Project reported synthetic cannabinoids, along with benzodiazepines, as the most commonly identified NPS drug types in 2017/2018.…”

NBOMe Designer Drugs: GC-MS and LC-QTOF/MS Detection on Blotter Paper by Brazilian Federal Police (Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil)

“…To date, only few and very recently papers about blotter paper samples seizures in Brazil were published 1,9,13,[24][25][26] . The present study is a small start in the sense of to know the actual scenario of the blotter paper drug market.…”