Analysis of urine from pooled urinals - a novel method for the detection of novel psychoactive substances.

Current data on the epidemiology of recreational drug use is largely based on population and self-population surveys of drug use. In addition, increasingly, particularly for novel psychoactive substances, data collected from web monitoring systems is used to collect information on early trends in the use of NPS and the drugs available to users. All of these indicators rely on users self-report of the drug(s) that they are using, or more accurately the drugs that they perceive they are using. Numerous recent studies have demonstrated significant variation in the content of both classical recreational drugs and novel psychoactive substances. The technique of waste-water analysis has allowed estimation of population level use of a number of established recreational drugs such as cocaine and MDMA. However this technique is limited for novel psychoactive substances because of limitations in the knowledge of the stability and metabolism of these compounds. Our group has developed a technique that involves the collection and analysis of pooled-urine from standalone portable urinals and demonstrated that this technique can be used to detect the use of both classical, established recreational drugs and novel psychoactive substances. We discuss this technique in this paper and the ways in which this can be further developed to allow detection of use of new NPS and trends in use of these substances over time and across geographical regions.