Determination of amphetamines in hair by GC/MS after small-volume liquid extraction and microwave derivatization.

We report here on the results of a procedure for the determination of amphetamine drugs in hair. The procedure is simple and sensitive. The results from the procedure using small-volume extraction matches perfectly with those either from using the derivatization method or selected ion monitoring (SIM) detection. We validated our method using four different amine drugs, including amphetamine, methamphetamine, methylenedioxy-amphetamine and methylenedioxy-methamphetamine. The detection limit for these drugs is about 50 +/- 7.5 pg/mg in hair and the intra-day and inter-day reproducibility are within 15% at most drug concentrations. Moreover, we also showed the utility of the procedure in analyses of authentic hair samples taken from amphetamine abusers, and demonstrated that the method meets the requirement for the analysis of a trace amounts of amphetamines in human hair.