Narcotic and psychotropic substances are all chemicals that affect a person&rsquo / s mental activities, perceptual abilities, behavior and level of consciousness / they may cause physical and/or psychological dependence. For determination of narcotic and psychotropic substances, chromatographic techniques are usually preferred which are aimed to identify the target chemicals and require several extraction steps. In this study, an Infrared Spectrometric method has been developed for qualitative determination of most widely encountered substances (morphine, heroin, cocaine, MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamhetamine) and amphetamine) and additives (caffeine, paracetamol and lactose). Standard reference materials and illicit samples have been analyzed in powdered form by using Fourier Transform Infrared-Attenuated Total Reflectance (FTIR-ATR) technique. In the first part, a spectral FTIR database was constituted from the standard references. Illicit samples containing drugs and additives in varying percentages were analyzed using the same method and their database forecast results were compared with results from Gas Chromatography and High Pressure Liquid Chromatography. In the second part of the study, the possibility of finding a similarity between two samples just by comparing their spectra was investigated. For this purpose, all illicit sample spectra were collected in a new database, and then randomly selected samples were searched using this database. Most of the search attempts resulted in a correct match. Consequently, it has been observed that FTIR-ATR can be used as a priory detection step for classification studies / moreover with this technique pre-determination of narcotic and psychotropic substances can be done simply and rapidly.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:METU/oai:etd.lib.metu.edu.tr:http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12606293/index.pdf |
| Date | 01 July 2005 |
| Creators | Baran, Ozlem |
| Contributors | Ataman, Osman Yavuz |
| Publisher | METU |
| Source Sets | Middle East Technical Univ. |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | M.S. Thesis |
| Format | text/pdf |
| Rights | To liberate the content for public access |
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