Portable Electrochemical Screening of Nitazenes: A Proof-of-Concept for On-Site Forensic Detection

Abstract

Recent years have seen the emergence of nitazenes within the global illicit drug market, and they are increasing in their prevalence within the synthetic opioid group of emerging novel psychoactive substances. They represent a significant risk to public health due to their extreme potency, often being far more potent than fentanyl analogues. Indeed, they have been found present in a large number of fatal cases globally, highlighting their risk to the public. The rapid diversification of nitazenes also poses a substantial hurdle to forensic investigation, and the United Nations Office of Drug Control has highlighted the need for improved capabilities, methodologies, and screening technologies to detect the presence of nitazenes. This contribution examines the use of differential pulse voltammetry (DPV) as a potential screening method to address this challenge. Electrochemical techniques offer themselves to the development of rapid, portable, robust, and easy-to-use screening methods for forensic drug screening. As an initial proof-of-concept, this contribution explores the detection of three nitazenes, namely, isotonitazene (Iso), etonitazene (Eto), and N-desethyl isotonitazene (N-des iso). This illustrates the potential of DPV to be deployed at crime scenes for the rapid screening of suspected drug samples as a simple and robust method for the screening of drug samples suspected to contain nitazenes and demonstrates the capacity for this screening sensor following optimization over the micromolar concentration range (differing slightly for each nitazene) based on their electrochemical responses, thereby providing essential information at the crime scene for stratification of samples within the forensic detection process.