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Aim of the Study: The aim of this study was to develop and validate a method for the determination of the synthetic cannabinoid AB-CHMINACA in blood, followed by its verification in forensic toxicological practice., Material and Methods: The case of a 41-year-old man admitted to hospital because of scheduled cardiac surgery was discussed. The man died after 12 hours of hospitalization. Based on collected evidence, AB-CHMINACA poisoning was suspected. The identification and determination of AB-CHMINACA in the man's blood was performed by high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with tandem mass spectrometry using electrospray ionization (HPLC-ESI-MS-MS), after prior solid phase extraction., Results: The concentration of AB-CHMINACA determined in the man's blood sample was 0.5 ng/ml., Conclusions: In the interpretation of the case, it was concluded that AB-CHMINACA had no direct effect on the patient's death, the cause of which was ascertained as chronic heart failure secondary to aortic valve disease, decompensated by pneumonia. However, an indirect impact of side effects resulting from the use of synthetic cannabinoids cannot be ruled out. They might have exacerbated the man's disease process leading to sudden cardiac arrest caused by asystole.

We experienced an autopsy case in which the cause of death was judged as poisoning by multiple new psychoactive substances, including AB-CHMINACA, 5-fluoro-AMB and diphenidine [Forensic Toxicol. 33 (2015): 45-53]. Although unchanged AB-CHMINACA could be detected from 8 solid tissues, it could neither be detected from blood nor urine specimens. In this article, we obtained eight kinds of reference standards of AB-CHMINACA metabolites from a commercial source. The AB-CHMINACA metabolites from the urine specimen of the abuser were extracted by a modified QuEChERS method and analyzed by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry before and after hydrolysis with β-glucuronidase. Among the eight AB-CHMINACA metabolites tested, only 2 metabolites could be identified in the urine specimen of the deceased. After hydrolysis with β-glucuronidase, the concentrations of the two metabolites were not increased, suggesting that the metabolites were not in the conjugated forms. The metabolites detected were 4-hydroxycyclohexylmethyl AB-CHMINACA (M1), followed by N-[[1-(cyclohexylmethyl)-1H-indazol-3-yl]carbonyl]-l-valine (M3). Their concentrations were 52.8 ± 3.44 and 41.3 ± 5.04 ng/ml (n=10) for M1 and M3, respectively. Although there is one preceding report showing the estimations of metabolism of AB-CHMINACA without reference standards, this is the first report dealing with exact identification using reference standards, and quantification of M1 and M3 in an authentic urine specimen., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.)