Imaginative techniques aimed at smuggling cocaine, one of the
most widely used drugs of abuse, through border controls have been
used in recent years, including dissolving cocaine in liquids. A UK
man died last year after unknowingly drinking from a contaminated
bottle of rum. However, it is currently impossible for customs to
check alcohols for cocaine without opening and damaging the bottle,
particularly for large or expensive alcohol shipments. The
researchers said a non-invasive approach also has the advantage of
not arousing the smuggler’s suspicions, thus allowing investigators
to track the recipient of the drugs.
The UK team, led by scientists at the Universities of Bradford and
Leeds, used Raman spectroscopy (RS), which employs laser light to
identify molecules, to identify the cocaine in alcoholic
substances. With a portable scanner, they tested cocaine dissolved
in ethanol and several branded light and dark rums, in a variety of
coloured glass containers including clear, brown, light green and
dark green. They found that the cocaine was detectable in all
liquids tested and through all of the glass colours.
‘Until now it has been difficult to detect cocaine in liquid form
in these environments,’ said Dr Tasnim Munshi, a lecturer in
inorganic chemistry at the University of Bradford. ‘However our
study shows that using an analytical technique such as Raman
spectroscopy we can successfully detect the presence of these drugs
without removing specimens from their containers.’ She said that
her team believed that ‘a portable Raman instrument will prove
vital in the fight against illegal drug smuggling by allowing for
the fast and effective screening of different solutions over a very
short space of time’.
Meanwhile, researchers led by Dr Giulio Gambarota from the Swiss
Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, used magnetic resonance
spectroscopy (MRS), the technique behind clinical MRI scanners, to
test wine bottles contaminated by cocaine. A MRI scanner is not
portable, but can test large cargos at once in a few minutes,
including set up and evaluation of the results. The team found that
it was possible to detect cocaine in wine in a scan time of one
minute.
‘By fostering collaboration between police or customs officials and
a local medical department, this technique can be used to evaluate
large numbers of bottles in a short time, giving information not
only that there is another substance in the alcohol as with current
scanning techniques, but exactly what that substance is, said,’ Dr
Gambarota, adding that ‘this method could also be used in other
sorts of smuggling where drugs are dissolved into liquids, so there
are many further opportunities for use.’
Despite this positive conclusion, the researchers acknowledged in
their paper that the detection limit could be degraded by the
presence of metal. They said this problem could arise if, for
example, the suspect wine bottles were surrounded by a metallic
net, had a metal cap or were stored in aluminium-coated containers
They also pointed out that while such investigations can be
performed in any hospital that has a MRI scanner, the experiment
would have to be carried out by MRS-trained staff in order to
ensure the data acquired was accurate.
