Drug Testing Reagents are chemical solutions that change in color when applied to a chemical compound. They can help determine what chemical might be present in a given sample. In many cases they do not rule out the possibility of another similar compound being present in addition to or instead of the one suspected.
Introduction to Drug Testing Reagents
There are readily available testing kits which can assess for the presence of MDMA or other adulterants. Those include the Marquis, Mandelin, and Mecke reagents along with the Simon's reagent and its Robadope variant.
The testing kits are available on the internet. Each test comes with the reagent, a color chart, and an explanation of how to perform the procedure. The website and the description of the kits indicates for which substances the reagents can be used to test, but they will also react with other substances not indicated on the website.
All reagent tests are similar in how they are performed. A drop of a reagent is added to a small amount of powder or a scraping from a pill. Depending on the substances present, the solution will change color and the color change can be compared to a chart that indicates which color corresponds to which substance.
It is also important to consider that if more than one substance is present the reaction may be different colors, therefore multiple tests and the use of different reagents is often necessary to determine the compounds present in a pill.
Drugs reagents are often existed before the drugs they test. Those reagents were initially used to identify the result of a synthesis, when advanced methods like NMR, mass spectrometry and chromatography were unavailable. Therefore, althought only a few reagents are commonly used to test drugs, there exists dozens of different testing reagents, many of which are very specific to a few class of compounds.