The Development of Chemical Analytical Tools for Community Drug Checking
| dc.contributor.author | Gozdzialski, Lea | |
| dc.contributor.supervisor | Hore, Dennis | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2024-01-03T17:55:40Z | |
| dc.date.copyright | 2023 | en_US |
| dc.date.issued | 2024-01-03 | |
| dc.degree.department | Department of Chemistry | |
| dc.degree.level | Doctor of Philosophy Ph.D. | en_US |
| dc.description.abstract | Drugs have many uses from pleasure to pain relief, ceremony, and medicine. Drugs also carry risks, from uncomfortable side effects, to dependence, and even death. In the case of pharmaceuticals, most people are familiar with receiving instructional notes and warnings such as "take with food" or "let your pharmacist know about other medications that might have undesirable interactions." Strict quality control means that prescribed and regulated drug mixtures are known to be as safe as possible. In the case of the illicit drug market, such assurances of quality and support are not afforded. In response, this thesis focuses on advancing the technology required for drug checking, a grassroots harm reduction initiative that aims to provide a level of quality control to the illicit drug market using various analytical approaches. Due to the unprecedented and increasing number of overdose deaths, these services have been expanding throughout North America. Drug checking empowers people who use drugs with the knowledge of what they are consuming and further provides an avenue for education and support to communities about the local drug supply. However, implementation of drug checking faces many barriers not only systemically but analytically as well, in part due to the dynamic and unpredictable drug supply and demand for simple, cost-effective, and point-of-care techniques. This thesis explores several point-of-care analytical methods in their application to drug checking. These analytical methods include immunoassay test strips, infrared, Raman, and surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy, and gas chromatography–mass spectrometry. Notably, this research and development takes place while concurrently providing drug checking as a community harm reduction service. Most of the datasets used throughout this work are acquired at the service and reflect the local drug supply. A major focus of this research is on the detection of opioids and benzodiazepines in drug mixtures. Chemometric approaches are used to evaluate, compare, and improve the capability of multiple instruments in providing useful drug information for the local supply. This includes classification and quantification schemes using a wide range of methods such as partial least squares regression, local outlier factor, principal component analysis, random forest classifier, least angle squares regression, correlation analysis, k-nearest neighbours, multivariate curve resolution, and density-based spatial clustering. Performance metrics, such as true positive rates, false positive rates, F1 scores, and receiver operating curves for qualitative detection and root mean square error and accuracy profiles for quantification, are used for evaluation. Additionally, a custom analysis platform is developed and implemented using Python and Jupyter notebooks to allow for such developments to be actualized within the service. Beyond technical evaluation, discussion of the results of this research largely considers the practical requirements of point-of-care service delivery. Within this work, technical information regarding drug checking technologies and data analysis is contextualized within harm reduction and contributes to strengthening the body of drug checking literature and resources. | en_US |
| dc.description.scholarlevel | Graduate | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/1828/15767 | |
| dc.language | English | eng |
| dc.language.iso | en | en_US |
| dc.rights | Available to the World Wide Web | en_US |
| dc.subject | drug checking | en_US |
| dc.subject | spectroscopy | en_US |
| dc.subject | machine learning | en_US |
| dc.title | The Development of Chemical Analytical Tools for Community Drug Checking | en_US |
| dc.type | Thesis | en_US |