According to Melanie Bailey from the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom, a test has been developed that takes less than two minutes and can detect a trace of cocaine on human skin, offering a critical solution in forensic science, toxicology, and clinical testing. Tests were conducted on 26 people who touched cocaine in the past 24 hours, which had the purity of 99 percent, as well as less purity like street samples. Samples were collected before and after washing hands and were tested with the help of mass spectrometry techniques to detect the presence of cocaine or benzoylecgonine, cocaine’s primary metabolite. The results showed that the fingerprinting technique was 95 percent accurate among participants and demonstrated that it is possible to distinguish between the touch and ingestion of cocaine in a drug testing scenario.
