Clinical Chemistry Podcast

Studies have found that drugs are now so prevalent that over 10% of a population were found to have traces of Class A drugs on their fingerprints despite never using any of those drugs.  While fingerprints have been suggested as a possible sample to rapidly and noninvasively carry out drug testing, identifying drug users and not those who may have passively encountered a drug can be complex. In a study published in the June 2018 issue of Clinical Chemistry and available online now, researchers from the University of Surrey together with Dutch scientists may have found a solution.  They present evidence that their techniques give a zero false positive rate in the fingerprints from drug-free volunteers.  Yet, they were able to detect 87.5% of the cocaine users and 100% of heroin users.