Determination of Cocaine by Square Wave Voltammetry with Carbon Paste Electrodes

Abstract

We compare the electrochemical behavior of cocaine hydrochloride (in acidic medium) and its free base form (in acetonitrile) by a simple, cheap, and fast square wave voltammetry method for cocaine analysis based on carbon paste electrodes without chemical modification. The electrodes performed better than the electrodes obtained for analysis on commercial screen-printed electrodes, which we also tested here. We conducted the analyses in aqueous solution containing 0.1 mol/L NH4ClO4 as supporting electrolyte. For cocaine in acidic medium, the linear correlation coefficient, the LOD, and the LOQ were 0.996, 4.66 10^(-6) mol/L, and 1.55 10^(-5) mol/L, respectively. For cocaine in acetonitrile medium, the linear correlation coefficient, the LOD, and the LOQ were 0.994, 9.77 10^(-6) mol/L, and 3.26 10^(-5) mol/L, respectively. The specificity of the methodology is advantageous when the response of different interfering substances analyzed in this work (lidocaine, procaine, caffeine and phenacetine) is concerned.

Keywords

• Forensic chemistry
• Cocaine
• Voltammetry
• Carbon paste electrode