Determination of Morphine in Urine

Abstract

Morphine is a well-known and widely used analgesic drug that gives a dreamlike feeling to which people get easily addicted. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, morphine was first separated from opium poppy in pure form. Till now, a large fold of increment in the use of morphine is reported, not as medicine but as the drug of abuse also. So, an efficient detection method of morphine is required to determine the trace amount of drug present in biological fluids. Among various biological fluids, urine is one of the most popular matrices for drug screening because drugs are generally concentrated in urine. In the previous decades, a steady development has been observed for the betterment of morphine detection techniques in a urine sample. In this chapter, several determination techniques of urinary morphine have been compiled and discussed. Several chromatographic [like gas chromatography (GC), liquid chromatography (LC), high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), thin-layer chromatography (TLC) and capillary electrophoresis (CE)] and non-chromatographic methods (like electrochemical detection, molecular imprinting) are discussed. Among these, the hyphenated techniques (like HPLC-mass spectroscopy) are better for screening drugs than normal techniques (only HPLC). Role of artificial antibody, i.e. molecularly imprinted polymers, in the selective detection of morphine is also discussed in this chapter. The major attention of this chapter is to communicate the advantages, drawbacks and future feasibility of available procedures reported so far to the readers/researchers working in this field.