A greener way to detect hidden differences in synthetic cannabinoids

Synthetic cannabinoids (SCs) belong to one of the fastest-growing classes of new psychoactive substances nowadays. Among users, they can be sprayed onto herbal incense or paper or used as E-liquids. As many of them are still legal, they can be purchased on the internet very easily. Their continuous appearance on the illicit drug market and structural variability poses significant challenges for their analysis and detection. Moreover, some of them are chiral and could be distributed either as pure enantiomers or racemates. Sub/supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) is regarded as a greener separation technique than normal-phase liquid chromatography. In this work, we demonstrate the potential of SFC both for enantioseparation and achiral separation of a set of 11 chiral SCs obtained from internet vendors. On the basis of the results from HPLC measurement with optical rotation detector, two samples were present as racemates, whereas the others were not. Simultaneous baseline enantioseparation of both racemates in SFC confirmed its high enantioselective potential. Moreover, an SFC method with a specialized, diol-bonded stationary phase designed primarily for achiral screening purposes was presented.