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Handheld Drug Spectrometer

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Cake541

Greenlighter
Joined
Feb 12, 2018
Messages
16
Location
Oregon, usa
So in my internet flailing I discovered this crazy device that can supposedly test drugs and lookalikes through the bag and will even show cutting agents and other things mixed in the bag.

It's by ThermoFisher and it's called the TruNarc.

Here's a link for it

://www.thermofisher.com/order/catalog/product/TRUNARC

There's a bunch of info about it and you can request a quote for a price. I assume it is only for police and government and it probably is super expensive. I didn't get a quote yet because I got busy. If anyone finds info on a price please post it.

So anyhow I think this is pretty cool as long as a cop isn't using it haha. It's not much bigger than a smart phone and if it is really accurate it would be handy. All these nasty cuts and additives that are hazardous could be detected.

What's your all's opinion on this? Anyone ever seen one or know anything about the reliability of spectrograms in general?

Oh and if anyone has any experience with these, I like to build electronics and wonder how hard this would be to duplicate on my own. Schematics would be cool or something....
 
Oh only 20 that's pocket change ( sarcasm). 20,000 dollars is way more than I assumed. It's probably like Rf scanners to find "bugs". They can be made for practically nothing and these companies upsell them for 100 times more. Playing on paranoia and disinformation. I wonder what it would cost to create one yourself or if that would even be worth the effort. Sorry for the bad link I'm using an Android phone and it doesn't work well with the forums
 
IR spectrophotometers have been DIY-ed and crowdsourced funding, developed and drivers coded already, using things like CD-rom based diffraction gratings (might have been a DVD, I forget now, and interfaced with an Iphone. Plans are available online or even kits or complete items buyable. And for a lot less than 20k USD, intended for hobbyist use. Be a lot easier to build one than buy one in terms of price.

And a secondhand UV-VIS spectrophotometer would be cheap, if you look on ebay. They are commonly sold for a few hundred USD. Whilst I'd prefer FT-ICR myself that would be expensive way beyond my means to buy, and I'd have to build it if I were ever to get one (fourier-transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry), or for photon-based spectrometry then an IR model rather than UV-VIS, I've been giving some thought, doing a bit of reading up on the range and versatility of a UV-VIS spectrophotometer for my sorts of uses (I'm a chemist hobbyist, and theres nothing I like better than to get myself new toys for the lab, be it glassware or reagents or electronics. Last major buy was a rotavap, in terms of electronics. Need to get myself a replacement vacuum pump or two though before I shell out on a spectrophotometer.)

And definitely agree, there is a lot to find interesting about analytical equipment and the way the various technologies function (and potentially could be hacked)..just as long as it isn't being operated by a set of filthy diseased trotters that need cutting off and the bleeding stumps stuck in red hot salt. Filthy cocksucking babyfuckers, they need to go fucking die of cancer and roast in hell on pointy, shit-covered infection-riddled stakes for the rest of eternity.
 
Conventional FT-IR is about the same price (Bruker Alpha instrument) and seems to be more reliable. There isn't the issue of infrared-fluorescence that Raman IR has, which means there is no need for consumable (expensive) SERS strips for some samples. The advantage of Raman is the ability to pass through plastic baggies and the ability to ignore moisture but most people doing testing can take it out of the bag and most substances are not wet (or can be easily dried).

As with all these things, the reference library is absolutely crucial, but SWGDRUG has a free reference library available: http://www.swgdrug.org/ir.htm

The Bruker Alpha instrument uses a computer algorithm to "separate" spectra in a mixed sample so will handle non-complex samples well. For weird combinations and things with small amounts of contaminant, real physical separation is necessary and TLC is the cheapest way to do this. The bunk police actually sell a consumer kit for this. http://bunkpolice.com/separation-test-kit/


UV-Vis is good for quantification if you have a reference standard and could be used for ID but most people will get better mileage from learning to use TLC.
 
Imo if you feel like having whatever the mount in the states is then I could say that getting old means other cant get em fom your.
 
Couldn't agree more. The marketing of that link seems to tip-toe around the basic fact that street samples, especially pressed pills, would be far too complex of a mixture for such a device to have any use. But of course, after either solvent separation or chromatography, this looks like an excellent way to determine what pure substance one has in front of them,
 
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