REVIEWS


FORENSIC SCIENCE Discovering dopers


It was US president Ronald Reagan who, in 1986, initiated an executive order for urine drug testing for federal employees, which suitably modified became the White House Drug Control Strategy directive issued by president George H.W. Bush three years later. So, employees in the US in both the state and private sectors may be tested at work, particularly if they work in areas like transportation and defence, and it is possible that US citizens may be screened as part of a job interview. Testing in the UK is, at present, more restricted. That said, people have tested


positive for opiates at work and have fallen under suspicion of being heroin users when in fact they have eaten poppy seed bread, which contained traces of morphine, a metabolite of heroin. This has become known as the ‘poppy seed defence’, and it’s not that many years since the tennis player Richard Gasquet escaped a doping ban when the International Tennis Federation ruled that he inadvertently took cocaine by kissing a woman in a nightclub.


When a drug molecule is


introduced into the human body, the body doesn’t leave it alone, but goes to work using enzymes to metabolise and excrete it; the presence of these metabolites shows that the drugs have passed through the body. Thus, cocaine gets broken down in the liver by carboxylesterase enzymes hCE1 and hCE2 – just 1% of the cocaine is excreted unchanged – and within four hours, metabolites like benzoylecgonine can be detected and have been used to show that people like Diego Maradona and Martina Hingis have taken cocaine. The analyst can tell if someone


has been smoking cocaine rather than just snorting or injecting it, by detecting the pyrolysis product, methylecgonidine. Performance enhancing drugs


have been used in sports for over a century. Strychnine was employed at the 1904 St Louis Olympic Games; after World War II, amphetamine and steroid use became rampant, culminating in the death of the British cyclist Tom Simpson on an incandescently hot Mont Ventoux on 13 July 1967. The final of the men’s 100m event at the 1988 Seoul Olympics on 24 September 1988 left an imperishable image of the Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson crossing the line and turning to look at the rest of the field, headed by Carl Lewis and Linford Christie, struggling in his wake; three days later, Johnson was stripped of his gold medal having tested positive for stanozolol. Little more than 10 years later,


the focus of drug abuse in sport has shifted to ‘undetectable’ steroids like THG, provided by California-based business BALCO, which supplied performance-enhancing drugs and supposedly ‘undetectable designer drugs’ to athletes. Their detection implicated sportsmen including Dwain Chambers, and Marion Jones was to lose five Olympic metals after admitting taking THG at the Sydney Olympics in 2000. So drug testing has been around


for years, and it is becoming more sophisticated as time goes on, as this book shows. It covers a wide range of abused drugs, complemented by a correspondingly wide range of testing methods and situations. Many readers of C&I would first have been aware of drug testing in


Ben Johnson salutes the crowd as he sprints to victory in the 1988 Seoul Olympics 100m final. He was subsequently stripped of his gold medal after testing positive for stanozolol


the context of the breathalyser, and one chapter does indeed examine ethanol analysis in breath, blood and urine. Two centuries ago, Mathieu Orfila, the ‘father of toxicology’, analysed poisons in urine, and one chapter brings urinalysis up to date. The presence of drugs and their


metabolites can be recognised in other regions of the body, and this is considered in other chapters, which examine testing of blood spots, exhaled breath and latent fingerprints. The latter area has afforded some of the most striking research in recent years, applying detection methods as varied as vibrational spectroscopy and mass spectrometry on the one hand and antibody-functionalised gold nanoparticles on the other. Most drugs can be tested


Detection of drug misuse


Editor Kim Wolff Publisher RSC Pages 396 Price £86.99 ISBN 978-1-78262-157-7


Reviewer Simon Cotton is an honorary senior lecturer in chemistry at the University of Birmingham, UK


for in blood and in urine within around four days of consumption, but hair analysis shows them for several weeks, although at present, techniques may not be sensitive enough to detect single use of a drug. Much of the concern in recent years over new psychoactive substances has centred upon piperazines and cathinones, and this is reflected in two chapters here. Further topics examined include the role of metabolites in the interpretation of drug test results, and the detection of steroid misuse; steroids like nandrolone, stanozolol and testosterone still figure largely in abuse in sports with the last named being implicated in the disqualification of the ‘yellow jersey’ Floyd Landis from first place in the Tour de France in 2006. This is a very wide-ranging book,


which I found both challenging and stimulating.


42 02 | 2018


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