Sugar and fatty acid analysis in ecstasy tablets

Sugars and stearates (composed of fatty acids) are both frequent components used in the production of ecstasy tablets. Their analysis can therefore provide supplementary information useful for drug intelligence. Links established using these substances would be very significant as they should give us information about the manufacturer of the tablets. Two methods have been developed for the analysis of sugars and fatty acids by GC-MS and were applied to 109 ecstasy tablets. Characterisation of the samples should allow the differentiation of a certain number of them and furthermore their classification into groups. This is obtained by analysing the raw data using chemometric methods. Several pre-treatments have been tested together with six similarity measures on a small number of ecstasy samples in order to determine which combination would best characterise one ecstasy sample and differentiate it from the others at the same time. Normalisation followed by the fourth square and applied together with the squared cosine function appeared to give the best results and has been applied to all samples. The correlation values obtained of each sample with all others express the probability of a presence of a link between two samples. In order to verify the signification of these values, and thus of a link, all samples have been compared considering the data visually according to three selected criterions. The 109 examined samples could be divided into 67 groups, with 43 of them containing only one sample. Considering the distribution of their correlation values, sample pairs showing a value below 0.23 can be considered as linked. As the excipients are necessarily related to the blending, which also includes the active substance, and variation in the excipient content has been proven by the grouping of the samples, a low similarity value does indicate a link with regard to the producer. In conclusion, it appears that the result obtained with the excipients is certainly very valuable, but all other available information has to be taken into account as well before making any conclusions.