PARACELSO TENIA RAZON

Se remite interesante artículo pendiente de ser  publicado en el cual  se notifica la ausencia de  patrones fiables de muestras de Heroína .
Interesante lectura que recomendamos.
Como saben hay sanciones administrativas ,de 300 euros cuando se detectan este tipod e sustancias en muy bnaja cantidad y no es objeto de un procedimiento  por vía  penal,sino que, por criterios no demasiado claros, se considera por parte de la autoridad aprehensora, que la cantidad es baja ( ¿que es bajo consumo?) ¿una papelina' ¿Dos? ¿siete  piezas o chinos de   hachis?

 Pues  depende del humor de ésa mañana del policía  o del guardia civil que efectúa el decomiso o la detención o el apercibimiento o que, simplemente, le  retiene cautelarmente las tres chinas de costo o las dos papelinas de supuesta heroina que lleva el fulano.

Lo realmente penoso del tema es que éstas sanciones  prescriben en seis meses, o bien son fácilmente evadibles por parte de los  afectados  declarándose  insolventes ( dentro de poco todos vamos a estar con el agua al cuello y vamos a ser insolventes, pero de verdad, con la quiebra del Estado gracias a la mala  gestión de las 17 autonomías  de Taifas)  y  si que vamos a aumentar los insolventes DE VERDAD.

En Alemania, la sanción no es de 300 euros, sino muy superior, y si además hay   reincidencia, pues la cuantía d e la multa sube y ademas puede ir acompañada de estancia gratuita a cargo del Estado.
En España, la sanción administrativa de consumo de drogas es de 300 euros y  no se pagan ni la mitad de ellas.


Y sin mas quejas, ni lamentaciones, que para nada sirven, les  endosamos el texto del interesante artículo.


TEXTO.
When illicit drugs are tested in forensic labs, one of the main requirements is to measure the amounts of the active components in a particular sample. Take heroin as an example. Chemically, heroin is actually diacetylmorphine, which is prepared from the morphine in opium by an acetylation process. Apart from diacetylmorphine itself, street samples of heroin contain other opium alkaloids and their acetylated derivatives that are formed during the illegal production process.
Then the drug workers cut the heroin with other substances like local anaesthetics, analgesics and caffeine to mimic the taste and the initial effects of heroin, as well as sugars like lactose and sucrose as diluents. So, there are often many more chemicals present in the powder than you might expect. Some of these additives and impurities are also valuable indicators of the source of the drug and can match one sample to another.
For accurate measurement of diacetylmorphine, it is important to have a pure form of the compound to act as a reference standard. In China, this is not as simple as it sounds, according to Yun Wei, Zhen Guo and Yanzhen Lu from the Beijing University of Chemical Technology and Hui Zheng from the Drug Detection Division of the Institute of Forensic Science, Beijing. They claim that domestic heroin standards are of an inadequate quality while imported heroin arrives in solution form, which is inconvenient.
The research group already has a ready supply of heroin, albeit impure, in the street samples that they acquire for testing. So, they decided to use this as a source of pure heroin and took the unusual step of using preparative HPLC as the principal purification route. Prep. HPLC is widely used for separating active components from natural products but has rarely been reported for forensic science.

Prep HPLC provides pure heroin

Samples of street heroin were first dissolved in a mixture of methanol and isopropanol before separation by prep. reversed-phase HPLC on an octadecylsilica column fitted with a diode array detector and a fraction collector. The first mobile phase the team attempted comprised 23% methanol in aqueous 0.05% trifluoroacetic acid. This solution had given good separation in analytical RP-HPLC of the related alkaloid components codeine, 3-acetylmorphine, 6-acetylmorphine, acetylcodeine and heroin on a column of the same material.
However, in the prep. HPLC column which had an internal diameter of 20 mm compared with 4.6 mm i.d. in the analytical column, heroin coeluted with acetylcodeine. Furthermore, when this impure heroin fraction was concentrated in an evaporator, some heroin was hydrolysed to monoacetylmorphine.
Following further experimentation with a prep. normal-phase HPLC system, Wei adopted a similar mobile phase for their prep. RP-HPLC system. The initial proportions of hexane, isopropanol and methanol still gave poor separation of heroin from acetylcodeine but, after adjustment from 60:32:8% to 65:28:7% and an increase in flow rate from 8 to 10 ml/min, these two components were much better resolved.
The heroin fraction still contained less than 1% of monoacetylmorphine, but the overall purity was estimated to be 99.13% by RP-HPLC. After solvent removal, a sample of 180 mg street heroin yielded 156.15 mg heroin as the hydrochloride.
The team attempted to remove the monoacetylmorhpine traces by the so-called drowning-out crystallisation method, which is an efficient and inexpensive method commonly used to separate pharmaceutical compounds. This involves adding a second solvent to the solution to reduce the solubility of the target solute, in this case heroin.
The heroin fraction from prep. HPLC was dried and redissolved in a mixture of isopropanol and methanol then mixed with hexane as the drowning-out solvent. The precipitated heroin hydrochloride was found to be purer than before at 99.52%, although the yield dropped to 110.7 mg.
Given a final yield of approximately 61% and the high purity, the heroin is suitable for use as a reference standard for forensic science applications, say the researchers, so they will have an inexhaustible source derived from the samples of seized drugs that are brought in for investigation.

Forensic Science International 2012 : "Isolation and purification of heroin from heroin street samples by preparative high performance liquid chromatography strains by MALDI-TOF"