Analysis of amphetamines by capillary electrophoresis and liquid chromatography: application to drug seizures and cross-validation

Two methods, capillary electrophoresis (CE) and liquid chromatography (LC), have been developed for the separation and quantitation of amphetamines found in illicit drug seizures. These methods allowed us to determine, within less than 8 min and without interference from adulterants, the presence of six current amphetamines. No significant statistical differences between both validated methods were observed as linearity, precision, accuracy and limits of detection and quantitation were similar. However, the order of elution of amphetamines and of adulterants was different; hence, these methods proved to be orthogonal which is very convenient for forensic analysis. Further, CE and LC were applied to the analysis of 13 seized tablets with quantitative results statistically similar. Qualitative results were also confirmed by GC-MS procedure