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Abstract
Current forensic methods for detecting and identifying cocaine and its adulterants are destructive, so evidence cannot be re-analyzed. Vibrational techniques [Raman and Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy] allow rapid, economical, nondestructive analysis. This work compares these techniques as methods for quantifying mixtures of cocaine (in the crack presentation) and adulterants. The aim is to provide a method to determine the amount of cocaine in crack rocks and to identify and quantify possible adulterants. A sample of crack was adulterated with benzocaine, caffeine, sodium carbonate, and lidocaine to create binary mixtures of concentrations of 20%, 40%, 60%, and 80%; pure samples of each adulterant and of crack were also examined. All samples were observed using dispersive Raman and attenuated total reflectance FT-IR spectroscopy. Quantitative analysis was performed based on principal component regression (PCR) applied to simulated and real spectra. The PCR model revealed that the Raman spectra yielded only minor measurement errors and the highest correlations using the PC2 spectral vector, which presented spectral features of cocaine. Among the mixtures, the best and worst results were obtained for caffeine and sodium carbonate, respectively. Dispersive Raman spectroscopy outperformed FT-IR in the quantitative determination of binary mixtures of cocaine and adulterants.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
L. Silveira Jr. and M. T. T. Pacheco acknowledge CNPq (National Counsel of Technological and Scientific Development) for the Productivity Fellowship. L. Silveira Jr. thanks FAPESP (São Paulo Research Foundation) for the partial financial support (Grant 2009/01788-5).