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Drug Testing & Analysis

The drugs team at Key Forensic Services have an in-depth knowledge and wealth of experience in dealing with the rising number of drugs controlled under both the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 and the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016.

Drug identification & purity analysis experts

The Key Forensic Services team of highly experienced forensic scientists provides a wide range of cost-effective drug testing services to support the investigation and prosecution of offences.

Our drugs experts, working from our own on-site laboratories, offer services ranging from the provision of identity and weight for possession cases to drug purity, cannabis yield calculations and comparisons for supply, production, importation/exportation and conspiracy cases.

Collaboration is Key

Our team is represented on numerous bodies supporting collaboration and information sharing between forensic providers. As members of the European Network of Forensic Institutes (ENFSI), KFS drugs scientists are able to access drugs knowledge from across Europe to assist with identification of novel substances.

Our team is also represented on the European Network of Forensics Institute (ENFSI), which enables access to available drugs knowledge across Europe, while keeping up to date on legislative changes, ensuring practitioners provide expert guidance to our customers.

The services offered by our drugs team include:

The team uses a variety of methods to provide the weight and identity of a range of commonly encountered drugs, additives, pharmaceuticals and new psychoactive substances (NPS).
The concentration of drug within a preparation is determined for the main drugs of interest under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 to assist with the downstream valuation of commodities for court purposes, or to help build an intelligence picture of drugs in circulation.
A specialist, rapid turnaround analytical service is provided to support the operational needs of the buying phase of TPOs. Reports for use in court are provided, according to customer requirements.
Our team offers calculations of potential yields that could be achieved within a cultivation set-up, to assist the court with its judgement on the commercial scale of the growing operation.
It is often of benefit to higher-level cases to provide evidence that specifically addresses activities of the suspects, such as preparation and packaging or distribution of drugs. The comparison of packaging between wraps seized from different locations, or between wraps and unused materials, can assist with determining the role of suspects in the preparation and distribution of drugs. Comparative analysis of drugs preparations may afford the opportunity to comment on whether they share a common history within the UK drugs supply chain.
Our team can preserve item contents for subsequent fingerprint enhancement treatment and in-force DNA recovery. In addition, items can be contingency swabbed to recover DNA material pending customer clarification on the requirement for profiling.