New psychoactive substances continue to hit the black market and are used illicitly in club subculture. These drugs are unregulated and pose a problem for authorities because they are hard to analyze and the high rate of turnover to new products. Previously, no easily accessible standard screening test for these drugs was available.
Researchers have developed a new drug test for these “club drugs” which can detect ultra-low levels in urine and plasma. This will allow authorities to assess a cheaper and faster means to identify these substances. The researchers published in the Journal of Chromatography B.
The new test method utilizes gas chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (GC-MS/MS), which is often used in drug detection and fire investigation. The researchers extracted ketamine and its byproduct, norketamine, from 0.25mL of urine and plasma samples. Using the new method, they could detect amounts of the drug as low as 5 nanograms per milliliter. Being able to detect the drug in such small samples at low levels is helpful for forensic labs, since they would be able to run multiple tests on a single sample.