Determination of cocaine and its major metabolite benzoylecgonine in rabbit hair and blood by GC/MS

Nowadays, use of abused drugs is getter increasing between young people and adults. Negative influences of abused drugs constitute economic and social problems on individiual and society. It is important to determine people who use these drugs to prevent the use of drugs. In recent years, Hair is routinely used on toxicological analysis as well as biological samples such as blood and urine. The major practical advantages of hair testing are larger detection windows; the sample collection is non-invasive; it is easy to transport and store it and also hair analysis can provide a retrospective calendar of an individual?s drug use.In this study, New Zelland rabbits were intraperitoneally administered a single dose of cocaine. It is following that hair samples were collected during 12 days. According to our data, while cocaine is appeared the first five days after single dose of cocaine administration, Benzoylecgonine is not detected after three days. Frequency of benzoylecgonine existence is lower than cocaine. Limit of Detection (LOD) and Limit of Quantification(LOQ) were calculated for cocaine and benzoylecgonine. We did not find differences between groups.These results demonstrate that determination of cocaine and its metabolite cocaine in hair by GC/MS can be employed for routine analysis at the Forensic Toxicology Laboratory of the Çukurova University, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Forensic Medicine