The subjective effects of drugs are related to the kinds of feelings they produce, such as euphoria or dysphoria. One of the methods that can be used to study these effects is the drug discrimination procedure. Many researchers have been trying to elucidate the mechanisms that underlie the discriminative stimulus properties of abused drugs (e.g., alcohol, psychostimulants, and opioids). Over th...

The basic aspects of capillary electrophoresis (CE) such as: instrumentation, separation modes and its chief domains of use in forensic analysis are presented. Micellar electrokinetic capillary chromatography (MECC), capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE) and chiral separations – the most often used separation modes in drugs analysis – are described. The main directions of development of CE metho...

OBJECTIVE The present study aimed to determine the frequency of drug abused in a sample of university students in Rafsanjan, Iran. METHODS In this cross-sectional study, 1,260 students volunteered (311 males and 949 females) with mean age of 21.35 years. Data were collected by a self-administrated questionnaire regarding drugs abuse and demographic information. RESULTS Benzodiazepines were ...

In Japan, not only the classical stimulant, methamphetamine, but also a wide variety of illicit drugs and designer drugs are abused by juveniles. It is, however, difficult to screen these drugs in human urine due to the poor availability of high-quality standards. Therefore, it is important to develop a screening method that does not require the use of standard compounds. Furthermore, if we can...

We describe a simple polarization fluoroimmunoassay for the detection of several commonly abused drugs in urine. The single reagent used, prepared by mixing four different antisera and three fluorescein-labeled derivatives, produces a polarization signal that is the average of the individual signals of the derivatives. One adds urine to the pre-mixed reagent, incubates at room temperature for a...

The effect of various drugs on the extracellular concentration of dopamine in two terminal dopaminergic areas, the nucleus accumbens septi (a limbic area) and the dorsal caudate nucleus (a subcortical motor area), was studied in freely moving rats by using brain dialysis. Drugs abused by humans (e.g., opiates, ethanol, nicotine, amphetamine, and cocaine) increased extracellular dopamine concent...