Mobile Vapour detection and identification of Synthetic drugs

ongoing

Drug production and trafficking is a major societal challenge globally, with a high focus on the EU. The drug trade wreaks devastation throughout its value chain: from overwhelmed government administrations, to violence and brutality of the drug cartels, to citizens who succumb to addiction or fatal overdoses. On top of that, we now need to deal with a quickly evolving and very dangerous situation: the proliferation of synthetic drugs, including new psychoactive substances (NPS), which represent a real threat to society, causing serious cross-border threats to health. Synthetic drugs have already changed the traditional drug production and supply model to the extent that traditional seizing methods do not work efficiently and as effectively anymore. This situation forces the authorities to develop and implement new strategies to combat their trade which is based on the importation of chemical precursors from Eastern countries with local production, highly concentrated in different EU areas, such as the case of the Limburg Region (The Netherlands). In addition to such new strategies, novel technologies, with better performances are required for the detection, specifically in terms of sensitivity, selectivity, versatility, portability and wider databases; this is the objective of the PENTION project which aims to develop a new vapour detector that relies on a very innovative concept of a differential mobility analyzer (DMA), which classifies molecular ions based on their electrical mobility, followed by mass spectrometry analysis. This analysis generates a chemical fingerprint of the samples, and after the processing with intelligent detection routines, it becomes possible to accurately classify and detect new drugs and precursors, as well as potential manufacturing sources. The project involves the Netherlands Police and the Limburg region (associated partner) where the problem of new drug synthesis is exponentially increasing year by year.