Apoyo al laboratorio de Química de la Fiscalía General de la Nación seccional Norte de Santander.

Abstract

The Attorney General's Office of Norte de Santander is an entity of the judicial public power. One of its duties is the process of characterization of illicit drugs in the country, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin, among others. For its part, the chemistry laboratory of the Attorney General's Office, Norte de Santander, works in the identification and characterization of these substances, using the gas chromatography technique with mass selective detector (GC-MS). Among these analyses is the extraction of cocaine from seized coca leaves using the ultrasound technique, but this extraction process drags impurities, such as chlorophyll and other organic compounds, that are extracted together with the analyte of interest, contaminating the chromatograph columns and wearing out important parts of the mass analyzer. Due to this problem, it is necessary to improve the extraction method, so studies were performed at different times in ultrasound (5 min, 10 min and 20 min), different solvents (methanol, chloroform, acetone) and solid phase matrix dispersion method (MSPD). Finally, the extraction methods evaluated were compared, selecting the time 5 min of the sample in the ultrasound and using acetone, these results were verified in their mass spectra, giving results in comparison greater than 90% with respect to the forensic spectrophotometer and times similar to the reference material. Finally, support was provided in the decongestion of plant substances with similar characteristics to coca leaf and in the updating of the quality management system (QMS) in the implementation of the 17025:2017 standard.