Report on characterisation of New Psychoactive Substances (NPS)
The emergence of designer drugs as abused substances has seen a dramatic increase over the past few years. About 70 new psychoactive substances were discovered in 2012 and more than 80 in 2013. Customs and forensic laboratories are faced with a challenge in identifying the chemical structure of these new compounds. Their analytical controls based on infrared spectroscopy and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry allow the recognition of known substances already recorded in spectroscopic libraries. However the identification of new derivatives as well as new chemical structures requires highly sophisticated analytical techniques such as Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) and High Resolution Mass Spectrometry (HR-MS). The report introduces an analytical strategy allowing the characterisation of unknown compounds based on the experience of the JRC in the use of these techniques. These approaches have been tested in the laboratory of the Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the efficiency of the proposed approach has been successfully demonstrated on several study cases. The report gives an overview of the analytical strategies and modern laboratory techniques needed to perform a fast unambiguous identification and characterisation of unknown organic chemical substances such as New Psychoactive Substances (NPS).
RENIERO Fabiano;
LOBO PEREIRA VICENTE Joana;
CHASSAIGNE Hubert;
HOLLAND Margaret;
TIRENDI Salvatore;
KOLAR Kamil;
GUILLOU Claude;
2015-04-14
Publications Office of the European Union
JRC92322
978-92-79-67400-6,
1831-9424,
EUR 28539 EN,
OP KJ-NA-28539-EN-N,
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC92322,
10.2760/871187,
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