Comprehensive Analysis of Drug Residues from a Confiscated Pipe

Introduction

The continuous influx of new synthetic drugs such as cannabis analogs into society is a major problem for law enforcement, forensic laboratories, and the medical community.^1,2

Relatively simple organic transformations produce novel and licit psychotics that can elude detection by standard analytical methods.3,4 Detection and characterization of synthetic drugs is complicated by 1) the wide range of active ingredients and variety of botanical matrices, 2) the rate at which new drugs and blends appear on the market, 3) the fact that these synthetic drugs and metabolites are often not targeted during routine forensic analyses,5,6 and 4) these newly emerging compounds are typically not present in commercially available mass spectral libraries. High performance time-of-flight mass spectrometry is a practical choice for the analysis of these moving targets.