The Chromatography Forum

of Delaware Valley

The use of emerging drugs created to circumvent the controlled substances laws has greatly increased over the last few years. Designer drugs are created by slightly modifying the chemical structure of a controlled substance. For a given class of drugs, these compounds consist of analogues, homologues, positional isomers and stereoisomers. GC-MS and LC-MS are commonly employed for the screening and confirmation of these solutes. The analysis of positional and stereoisomers can be particularly difficult due to similarity in MS fragmentation, scarcity of information in EI fragmentation for certain classes such as “bath salts”, including the lack of molecular ion. Therefore, a chromatographic separation and additional detection techniques becomes of upmost importance for the identification of designer drugs. This presentation will compare for synthetic cannabinoids and synthetic cathinones (“bath salts”) various chromatographic approaches including GC, UHPLC and UHPSFC. The use of two UHPSFC columns in tandem to increase overall resolution will be presented. In addition, the utility of UV detection in both the liquid and gas phase and cold EI to aid in the identification of emerging drugs will be discussed.