Marijuana testing in urine: use of a hexadeuterated internal standard for extended linearity, and ion trap vs mass...

The use of a hexadeuterated internal standard for the assay of the marijuana carboxy metabolite in urine resulted in two significant improvements. First, the linearity of the procedure was increased considerably because of the minimal chromatographic peak overlap of the internal standard and carboxy metabolite derivatives. Second, again because of minimal peak overlap, the same extract could be analyzed with similar results by both the ion trap detector and mass selective detector gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer systems.