A WAY of rapidly analysing ecstasy tablets can reveal how concentrated they are and whether they contain any contaminants, as well as providing a distinctive “fingerprint” that could help police link tablets from the same manufacturers.
While home test kits for ecstasy are widely available, they only reveal if the active ingredient, MDMA, is present – and have proved to be very unreliable. A proper analysis using gas chromatography takes a day. Instead, Steven Bell’s team at Queen’s University Belfast in the UK bounces laser light off the tablet’s surface and analyses the reflected light, a technique called Raman spectroscopy.…
