Drugs-of-Abuse Testing in Brain.

The majority of articles concerning drugs-of-abuse in human brain specimens were published in the 1980s. They focused primarily on opiates, cocaine, and cocaine metabolites - specifically, the interpretation of data when determining time intervals between administration of the drug and death and in determining the role of these drugs in the cause of death itself. This chapter presents an overview of those publications, as well as developments in techniques for sample preparation, automation, and detection, which, when combined with the routine use of stable isotope internal standards, promise more comparable results and could lay the foundation for a data collection of reliable reference values. Moreover, recently developed immunohistochemical techniques could pave the way for the systematic investigation of the function of drugs-of-abuse in specific substructures of the brain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]