Drug abuse in the developed world is an international problem. In the USA, in an effort to deter drug use and identify abusers so they may receive treatment, testing an individual’s urine has become a large commercial enterprise. Drug testing has also been a traditional part of clinical care in medicine and in the medicolegal investigation of death. While scientists conducting drug testing in the postmortem arena routinely analyze a variety of biological matrices, the specimen of choice in the drug testing industry in the USA is urine and in clinical medicine, serum. In recent years, interest has grown in the use of other matrices as drug.
