Comment on 'Comprehensive toxicological screening of common drugs of abuse, new psychoactive substances, and cannabinoids in blood using supported liquid extraction and liquid chromatography–quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry'.

This document is a comment submitted to the Journal of Analytical Toxicology. The authors address and clarify information presented in a previous publication regarding the development of a screening assay for drugs in blood. They discuss the evolution of standards and recommendations for toxicological investigations of drug-impaired driving, highlighting differences between the draft and final versions of the standards. The authors also compare the cutoff concentrations used in their study with the recommendations in place at the time of development and at present. They acknowledge that their method did not meet the analytical sensitivity requirements for certain analytes according to the final published standard. The article discusses the validation and limitations of a published method for screening drugs in blood samples. The authors explain that while the method met sensitivity requirements for immunoassay-based screening, it may not be possible to achieve the increased sensitivity required for confirmatory cutoffs for certain compounds. They also discuss the use of non-human blood for method development and validation, the need for additional guidance on critical validation parameters, and the evolving nature of standards in forensic toxicology. The authors emphasize the importance of considering the versioning of standards and highlight the dynamic nature of the standards environment. [Extracted from the article]