Extraction Procedures for Some Common Drugs in Clinical and Forensic Toxicology

Abstract

Abstract There are many reports in the literature which deal with general screening methods for drugs in both clinical patients and postmortem specimens [1–13]. Much attention has been given to the clinical aspects where urgent identification and quantitation of unknown drugs are required. Of prime importance in this work is the selection of a suitable extraction technique. The number of available drugs has increased enormously since the more popular extraction methods were described, when at that time most overdoses involved acidic drugs (salicylates and barbiturates). These extraction systems have not been adequately evaluated with many of the more modern and predominantly basic drugs.