Keeping on top of our nation’s grave drug addiction crisis presents formidable challenges, not least because the components of street drugs continuously vary and shift.

One of the most alarming trends in recent years is the emergence of xylazine, a powerful veterinary sedative commonly called “Tranq.” Tranq is frequently found as a cutting agent in illicitly manufactured fentanyl. 

Tranq works fine for animals but is known as the “skin-rotting zombie drug” when ingested by humans.  It can cause severe and gruesome wounds that are difficult to heal, and it affects a person’s heart rate, responsiveness, and breathing.

On December 19, 2023, President Biden signed the Testing, Rapid Analysis, and Narcotic Quality (TRANQ) Research Act into law. The TRANQ Act was produced when legislators from both parties in the House and Senate worked together to address the pressing national need caused by Tranq.

The bill directs the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to increase the public awareness of Tranq and other new synthetic drugs, to develop new tests to detect Tranq, and to set up partnerships with agencies on the front line of dealing with addiction and illicit drug use.

 NIST’s response to the charge from Congress and the President has been both robust and agile.

Members of a team from the Surface and Trace Chemical Analysis Group of NIST's Material Measurement Laboratory’s Material Measurement Science Division rolled up their sleeves. They addressed the directive, and NIST’s Rapid Drug Analysis and Research (RaDAR) Program is now meeting the challenges of trace residue analysis on drug paraphernalia. 

Research Chemist Ed Sisco leads the team, assisted by Engineering Technician Liz Robinson and Associates Meghan Appley and Elise Pyfrom. Ed emphasizes that while he may lead the team, the program would be “nowhere without the efforts of Liz, Meghan, and Elise.” 

The RaDAR program came out of a pilot project that was started in 2021 in response to inquiries from the Maryland State Police and Maryland Department of Health to better understand the chemical composition of street drugs throughout the state. Since moving beyond the pilot phase in late 2022, their customer base has grown to include public health and law enforcement entities from eight states, and agreements with entities from at least two additional states are in the pipeline.

The analytical workhorse of the RaDAR program is a technique called Direct Analysis in Real Time Mass Spectrometry (DART-MS). It enables the team to identify trace compounds collected from drug paraphernalia, such as needles, baggies, other packages, cookers, and smokers. Standard drug analysis methods take from 10 minutes to a half-hour to identify the chemical compounds present in a sample, but the DART-MS method needs less than one minute to do the same job. 

The high sensitivity of DART-MS means collaborators in the field need only to apply a cotton swab to the outside of the paraphernalia to be tested and send the swab to NIST. If a package is to be tested, collaborators do not even have to open the package.

Within 24 hours of receiving the sample, the NIST team analyzes it and sends the results back to the organization that submitted it, where the results are further disseminated to the community.

The rapidly changing drug supply is evident as the team discovers a new compound roughly every two weeks. The results they produce can be used to identify variations in opioids and cutting agents and lead to a better understanding of the geographic differences and distributions evident in the samples analyzed.

The long-term mission of the program is not to establish a nationwide drug-checking laboratory at NIST. Instead, the NIST team’s goals are to complete the necessary foundational research, to demonstrate the utility of their methods and workflows, and ultimately, to assist laboratories serving government jurisdictions and healthcare agencies with adopting NIST’s approach. 

This Material Measurement Laboratory program is yet another example of NIST’s service to the nation by providing analysis, publicizing best practices, and supplying solutions to an ever-expanding array of contemporary societal and technological challenges.