ABSTRACT
The identification and quantitation of the drugs of abuse in biological samples requires a large commitment of manpower and time within forensic science laboratories, especially when instrumental techniques are to be used for confirmation purposes after the usual screening immunoassays. These researchers have tried to develop methods of wide application, as well as high specificity, to confirm the presence of drugs of abuse and determine their concentrations. Chromatographia methods provide an inexpensive, yet powerful approach for the identification and quantitation of the controlled substances. Liquid chromatography is particularly well suited for the analysis of a number of the commonly controlled substances which are relatively non-volatile or thermally unstable. However, to our knowledge, most of the methods published in recent years describe the determination of only one or a few molecules. We have conducted a bibliographic reference search on this topic mainly concentrating on references published in the last four years (i.e., January 1st 1991 to January 1st 1995). A total of ninety references were found and these are summarized in Table 1.
