Capillary gas chromatographic drug screen for use in forensic toxicology.

ABSTRACT

A screening method is presented involving the use of capillary gas chromatography using a BP-5 column and nitrogen-phosphorous detection. This method is a quick yet reliable procedure for a large range of neutral and basic drugs and uses 1 mL or less of blood. Running standards that contain a number of commonly observed drugs with each batch of cases allows for more accurate tentative identifications of likely drugs in unknown cases and also provides a measure of quality assurance. This method is suitable for postmortem and clinical blood samples as well as plasma and serum.