Hair analysis for forensic applications: is the future bright?

“The unique characteristics of hair, make it extremely valuable in certain scenarios where the use of other biological specimens would be unsuitable.” The detection and quantitation of drugs and their metabolites in biological specimens is the ultimate form of assessing substance abuse by individuals. Drugs have been determined in blood and urine specimens for several years, because of their advantages, namely the possibility to correlate the levels to the observed signals and symptoms in the case of blood, and the high concentrations usually detected in urine. However, these specimens present several drawbacks, including the invasiveness of their collection procedures and...