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Capillary gas chromatographic drug screen for use in forensic toxicology
O H Drummer1, S Horomidis, S Kourtis
1Victorian Institute of Forensic Pathology, Monash University, South Melbourne, Australia.
Abstract:
A screening method is presented involving the use of capillary gas chromatography using a BP-5 column and nitrogen-phosphorous detection. This method is a quick yet reliable procedure for a large range of neutral and basic drugs and uses 1 mL or less of blood. Running standards that contain a number of commonly observed drugs with each batch of cases allows for more accurate tentative identifications of likely drugs in unknown cases and also provides a measure of quality assurance. This method is suitable for postmortem and clinical blood samples as well as plasma and serum.
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