Toxicology Screening

Rapid identification and quantitation of drugs in biofluids are helpful to the physician in managing patients with suspected drug intoxication. Higgins and O’Brien (1 ) noted that prior to 1960, drug overdoses usually consisted of a single drug. However, three years later they observed that multiple drug overdoses had risen to 13% (2 ). Law (3 ) reported that out of 240 proven drug misuse cases observed in Suburban Hospital, Bethesda, Maryland, over a four year period, 60% of the cases involved a single drug and 40% were multiple drug ingestions.