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A bitter pill to swallow? Comedian Roseanne Barr has perhaps been left with a bitter taste in the mouth after receiving a swift response to her tweet that partially blamed the sleeping pill, Ambien, for her social media discrepancies. Barr, who had been fired and her sitcom cancelled after making a series of racist tweets, had written that she had been ‘Ambien tweeting’ at two in the morning, implying the drug was partially to blame for her actions. In response, Sanofi US released a written statement and tweet stating: “While all pharmaceutical treatments have side effects, racism is not a known side effect of any Sanofi medication.” So, although some of Ambien’s listed side effects including the possibility of driving, walking or even having sex while sleeping when taking the sedative, Twitter outbursts of a racist nature are not listed among them…
MAKING HASTE IN THE DETECTION OF DESIGNER DRUGS Italian scientists have developed a method that allows them to accurately detect and identify designer drugs in record time. Designer drugs are those that are structurally or functionally similar to a controlled substance but differ sufficiently enough that they can avoid classification as illicit. As the numbers of such drugs are on the rise, they are not only causing law enforcement and regulatory agencies’ problems they are also posing a threat to public health. Current analytical detection methods that are used to test for drugs work by recognising and interacting with a specified drug molecule. However, with new designer
drugs the molecules are not yet known and so identification has be done from scratch, which is a lengthy process. To tackle the issues of identification and detection of these new psychoactive substances, researchers from the University of Padova (led by Fabrizio Mancin) have used nanoparticles with a coating that binds to most psychoactive substances. How does it work? Adding the coatednanoparticles to water containing psychoactive substances will see the formation of a new compound. It is this new compound — which is part nanoparticle, part drug — that can be analysed in a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer.
It is possible to perform this analysis as the nanoparticle molecular structure is known and so can be eliminated from the resulting data from the NMR machine, which will enable the analysts to discern what other structures are present. This method will allow for ‘cocktails’ of drugs to be identified simultaneously and even with low concentrations of drugs due to the sensitivity afforded by NMR. “In principle,” Mancin wrote in his paper published in Chemical Science, “by using this protocol it should be possible to propose a tentative chemical structure of a new ‘designer’ drug a few hours after the seizure of a single tablet.”