Rapid Determination of Heroin in Adulterated Commercial Beverage in Drug Transportation Cases

Publication date: October 2018Source: Chinese Journal of Analytical Chemistry, Volume 46, Issue 10Author(s): Run-Fang XIE, Zhi-Qiang LU, Yu-Fang CHAI, Xi-Hao WANG, Hui-Fangjie LI, Jin-Yun GUAbstractTo avoid supervision when crossing borders or at the airport customs, smugglers increasingly use body packing to transport drugs. Now, more secretive transportation methods used for smaller quantities have brought difficulties and challenges to forensic toxicologists. To identify heroin in adulterated beverage, a quantification technique using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) for beverage samples was developed, and heroin was extracted via solid-phase extraction (SPE). This method was developed and fully validated using spiked samples. Daily calibration for heroin and morphine-TMS (2–40 μg mL−1) and 6-acetylmorphine (1–20 μg mL−1) achieved correlation coefficients of more than 0.993. Limits of detection (LOD) and limit of quantification (LOQ) were evaluated, intra- and inter-day precisions (RSD) for each compound at all concentration levels were below 10%. The inter-day and intra-day accuracies ranged from 97.6% to 105.0% and from 90.1% to 110.8%, respectively. Chemical decomposition of heroin to 6-acetylmorphine in beverage or during extraction could not be avoided, especially during liquid-liquid extraction (LLE). Recovery for heroin using extraction with chloroform was below 63.24% in LLE or SPE. However, for all of the samples, recovery of heroin using SPE...
Source: Chinese Journal of Analytical Chemistry - Category: Chemistry Source Type: research