

In 2005, a 27-year-old Japanese man expired after drinking a mysterious liquid. Until this year, the exact cause of death was unresolved.

He had purchased the shady solution on the Internet and might have thought it was liquid ecstasy or a similar nightclub drug. Unfortunately, the careless shopper was not headed for the party of a lifetime. Instead, thirty minutes after downing the potion, he began vomiting and convulsing. Before reaching a hospital, his heart stopped.

After two years of investigation, Kei Zaitsu and his colleagues at the

Osaka Prefectural Police Headquarters concluded that the man was killed by PMEA — a new hallucinogen similar to PMA, which is five times more potent than mescaline. Their report will appear in an upcoming issue of Forensic Science International , but it is already available online.

Using two different instruments, Zaitsu searched for drugs in the dead man’s blood and urine. He was particularly keen on finding byproducts of PMEA — which were formed in the dead man’s liver. Traces of those chemicals would prove that the young man had ingested the drug before he died.

Since the illicit substance had never been studied in depth, the forensic scientists had to do a lot of work. The team made batches of the drugs and their natural byproducts, developed a procedure to find those chemicals in bodily fluids, and then used the new method on the real blood and urine samples.

With a Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometer, the researchers separated out each chemical from a urine sample and identified them individually. To be even more thorough, they tagged the drugs with a chemical called trifluoroacetic acid and checked for them again. Finally, they used a second type of mass spectrometer, one that can automatically handle liquid samples, to measure the exact amount of drugs in the dead man’s fluids.

Their hard work paid off. Zaitsu and his team found a hefty amount of the hallucinogen in their subject’s blood. More important, they gathered information that will make future investigations way easier. The forensics community now knows exactly what to look for in suspicious urine, how to look for it, and has a sense of what constitutes a deadly dose.

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