Abstract: Human hair is an important specimen for drug abuse analysis owing to its easy collection, long surveillance time window and good correlation between the “degree of addiction” and actual drug concentration. A simple method for determination of 4 amphetamines in human hair was developed. The hair was digested under basic condition, and the drugs in it were extracted using microvolume of chloroform. The organic layer was then transferred into another tube to be derivatized with N-methyl-bis(trifluoroacetamide)（MBTFA） by microwave heating. Finally the reacted solution was detected by gas chromatography/selected ion monitoring-mass spectrometry (GC/SIM-MS) directly. 2-Methyl-phenyl ethylamine was used as an internal standard. Good linearities were obtained for 4 amphetamines with correlation coefficients better than 0.996. The limits of detection, based on a signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) of 3∶1, were all about 50 pg/mg for amphetamine (AM), methamphetamine (MAM), methylenedioxy-amphetamine (MDA), and methylenedioxy-methamphetamine (MDMA) in hair. The reproducibility of the method was satisfactory, with the relative standard deviations of 6.0% for AM, 13.9% for MAM, 10.2% for MDA and 9.2% for MDMA. Some real hair from the drug abusers was analyzed with this method. The minimal hair is less than 5 mg (about 20 cm). The method is highly sensitive, easy to operate, time-saving and economic, which can be used for trace analysis of amphetamines in human hair.

Key words: amphetamine drugs, derivatization, gas chromatography/selected ion monitoring-mass spectrometry (GC/SIM-MS), hair , dynamic liquid-phase microextraction