Ultraviolet resonance Raman spectroscopy for the detection of cocaine in oral fluid.

Detecting and quantifying cocaine in oral fluid is of significant importance for practical forensics. Up to date, mainly destructive methods or biochemical tests have been used, while spectroscopic methods were only applied to pretreated samples. In this work, the possibility of using resonance Raman spectroscopy to detect cocaine in oral fluid without pretreating samples was tested. It was found that ultraviolet resonance Raman spectroscopy with 239-nm excitation allows for the detection of cocaine in oral fluid at 10μg/mL level. Further method development will be needed for reaching the practically useful levels of cocaine detection.