Surface ionization detection of amine containing drugs

Abstract

We report on the development of miniaturized detection systems for amine containing illicit drugs. The present investigation builds on our previous work, which has shown that surface ionization (SI) gas detection is very sensitive and selective towards molecules with amine functional groups and insensitive towards water vapour and methanol, i.e. two chemicals often used to prepare liquid solutions of illicit drug samples. Here we firstly demonstrate that amine-containing illicit drugs can be sensitively detected using flash evaporation directly into the air gap of a SI detector. We also demonstrate that this kind of straight-forward detection is insensitive to most additives present in street samples. Secondly, we demonstrate that SI vapour detectors can easily be interfaced to gas-chromatographic columns, which provides selectivity options beyond the intrinsic amine selectivity of SI detectors. Furthermore, the use of a GC-SI set-up with a split/splitless injection system has allowed us to precisely evaluate the SI detection limit.