DEA Acquires Waters Instrument for Training Forensic Chemists

Waters Corporation (Milford, Massachusetts) announced that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has purchased a Waters ACQUITY UltraPerformance liquid chromatograph for use in training new forensic chemists at the agency’s Special Testing and Research Laboratory in Dulles, Virginia. According to the company, the DEA has used similar systems for drug profiling and has investigated its use for drug screening. In drug profiling, trace impurities such as precursor compounds in synthetic drugs or the constituents of natural products such as opium are analyzed by liquid chromatography with a detection method such as photodiode-array detection or mass spectrometry.