ABSTRACT
Fentanyl and many of the fentanyl analogs are easily synthesized from the base 4-anilinopiperidine skeleton structure. Due to the emergence and widespread occurrence of fentanyl compounds there has been a lot of effort put into the development of analytical procedures for their analysis including a variety of separation and chromatographic methods. The combination of Gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS), GC–chemical ionization mass spectrometry, and spectroscopy confirmed the identification of what proved to be the first fentanyl analog. Rojkiewicz et al. described an assay for the quantitation of the fentanyl analog 4-fluorobutyrylfentanyl by High-performance liquid chromatography -MS. The Liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry has several advantages over GC-MS and is quickly gaining widespread use in forensic and toxicology labs. There are many approaches to the separation of compounds by liquid chromatography available to the analyst. The most common type of detector for liquid chromatography is the triple-quadrupole mass spectrometer.
