Osmolality Helps Detect Tampered Beverages
Osmolality could serve as a low-cost strategy that law enforcement agencies could use in their criminal laboratories to screen beverages that might contain liquid drugs or have evidence of tampering, according to James Wesley, a forensic drug chemist at the Monroe County Public Safety Lab in Rochester, N.Y.
Osmolality is a science that is based on osmotic pressure, or the number of dissolved particles in a solution. An osmometer is an instrument used to test osmolality, and hospitals have used the technology since the 1950s.
However, Don Wiggin, product manager for osmometer manufacturer Advanced Instruments in Norwood, Mass., osmometers have become portable, faster, and more affordable over the past five years.
Wesley, who has 10 years of experience working in the crime lab, suggests that osmolality would help police and crime labs deal with the emergence of liquid drugs.
“A screening method that could quickly identify ‘like’ liquids would make it easier to separate the items into groups for statistical sampling and further analytical testing,” explains Wesley.
Osmometers would be able to tell police that a liquid has been tampered with, but not identify the drug. What is more, osmometers only screen drugs that have small molecular weight, which means it would not be able to screen drugs such as amphetamines, cocaine, cannabinoids (marijuana, hash), opiates (heroin, morphine, opium), and phencyclidine (PCP).
Abstracted by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center(NLECTC) from Law Enforcement Technology (05/03) P. 78; Kanable, Rebecca.