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The greatest challenge for European drug policies is how to effectively respond to the dynamic and constantly changing market for new psychoactive substances (NPS). Even small modifications in the chemical structure of substances often allow circumventing existing laws. Also in prison, the consumption of NPS is rising and there is growing evidence that NPS are responsible for a large share of drug-related problems. Ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) is the technique of choice for trace analysis of illicit drugs or explosives at security points, for example airports. Currently, databases of the reduced mobility (K0 ) values are limited to classical drugs and should be completed with data of emerging NPS. In this article, K0 values, LODs (0.7-3.6 ng) and drift times of 25 synthetic cannabinoids were evaluated. The data were added to existing databases of IMS which were then applied for fast screening in prison. The detection capability of the portable IMS technique was evaluated by the determination of intra-day (0.089%) and inter-day precision (0.004% to 0.14%), systematic error (0.19%), and separation capability for structurally related NPS. The applicability of the methodology was demonstrated by the successful analysis of 12 different pieces of paper impregnated with synthetic cannabinoids, 7 different cosmetics, and 5 food samples (liquids), spiked with a mixture of narcotic drugs and a synthetic cannabinoid. In addition, 14 herbal mixtures and 36 different casework samples from prisons were analyzed provided by the State Office of Criminal Investigation Rhineland-Palatinate (Germany).

One of the greatest challenges for European drug police and customs forces is how to effectively respond to the dynamically changing market for new psychoactive substances (NPS). Due to the NPS phenomenon, there is an increasing demand by customs or drug enforcement organisations for rapid and portable analytical techniques to characterise unknown samples, such as Raman spectroscopy, which are frequently used as first indicative techniques to detect controlled substances like illicit drugs. In this study, the effective discrimination of 28 synthetic cannabinoids and 15 cathinone derivatives using three different Raman spectrometers with different excitation wavelengths (532, 785 and 1064 nm) was investigated. The results show a high comparability of the Raman spectra from different spectrometers using spectral pre-processing methods. A PCA model allows assigning a substance to a specific substance class and additionally provides information on the nature of structural building blocks of the cathinone derivatives or synthetic cannabinoids being in the focus of this study. Characteristic group frequencies for synthetic cannabinoids and cathinone derivatives are summarised in tables to support future identification in other studies and in police and customs forensic case work. Combining both the use of chemometrics and Raman frequency tables has been shown as a successful tool to improve the characterisation of 60 seized herbal mixtures containing synthetic cannabinoids as active ingredients.