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Volume 7, Issue 5 (Suppl) J Forensic Res 2016
ISSN: 2157-7145, JFR an open access journal Forensic Research 2016
October 31-November 02, 2016
October 31-November 02, 2016 San Francisco, USA
5th International Conference on
Forensic Research & Technology
Forensic analysis of a Glastonbury amnesty bin: Evaluation of compact spectrometer techniques compared to NMR
Majdah Alotaibi, Ian S Blagbrough and Stephen M Husbands
University of Bath, UK
Forensic analysis of amnesty bins provides reliable and quantitative data on identity and purity of drug substances. Identification
of cutting agents and their ratios can help link directly to a manufacturer or trafficking network. ATR-FTIR equipped with the
TICTAC drug identification database was evaluated in this study and compared to NMR to provide a rapid, precise test for identifying
substances and their impurities in an amnesty bin. The Glastonbury music festival (2013) amnesty bin samples were obtained from
the Drug Expert Action Team (DEAT), Avon and Somerset Constabulary, UK. ATR-FTIR spectroscopic analysis was performed on a
Bruker FT-IR spectrometer (ALPHA Bruker Optics, Billerica, MA, USA). 1H NMR data were collected on a Bruker 500 MHz NMR
spectrometer and NMReady-60 PRO (Nanalysis Corp., Canada). ATR-IR was successfully used to identify a wide variety of illicit
drug samples, e.g. ketamine (22), mephedrone (33), flephedrone (4), cocaine (13), heroin (10), MDMA (76), methylone (1), and
popper (14). Both ATR-IR and NMR discriminated between mephedrone and flephedrone, but benzocaine as a cutting agent was not
recognized by ATR-IR. The possible diversion of street ketamine samples from legal sources was investigated by detecting the low
levels of preservatives, down to 5µg/mL, present in pharmaceutical formulations using 1H NMR when ATR-IR could not detect such
concentrations of these preservatives. Although ATR-IR provides a quick non-destructive method to identify illicit drugs in seized
samples, NMR provides rapid and quantitative information on drugs, preservatives, cutting agents, and impurities.
Biography
Majdah Alotaibi is an Assistant Lecturer at the University of Tabuk, Saudi Arabia and is in the final year of her PhD at University of Bath, UK. Her project is focused
on “impurity profiling of illicit drugs” using different techniques, e.g. HPLC, NMR, EA-IRMS, LC-MS/MS, GC-MS and Polarography. She has 3 years experience in
the quantitative analysis of illicit drugs.
Majdah Alotaibi et al., J Forensic Res 2016, 7:5(Suppl)