Recent analytical strategies on "Date-Rape" drugs and its metabolites

Recently, much attention has been given to develop simple analytical methods for screening wide range of date-rape drugs. Drug abuse that changes human behavior and guides to crimes has become a serious problem throughout the world. The determination of various classes of abused drugs is an important in many fields of analytical toxicology, such as forensic analysis and antidoping analysis. The detection method must provide more accurate and reliable results from the test specimens. In this regard, attempt is made in this review to summarize the recent applications of these methods in keeping track with complexity of the sample matrices. The following topics are discussed under the headings of different sampling approaches for screening the drugs related to drug facilitated sexual assault and more commonly utilized analytical methods such as liquid chromatography, gas chromatography and capillary electrophoresis separation techniques coupled with mass spectrometry detector. Therefore, relentless efforts should continue to be deployed toward research and development in low cost, fast and efficient ways of detecting illicit drug from all kind of specimens for reliable and more accurate results.