Synthesis and characterization of phencyclidine and his derivatives

Abstract

Phencyclidine (PCP) or 1-phenyl-cyclohexylpiperidine is the best known representative drug from the compound class of arylcyclohexylamines. On an account of pharmacological activities it belongs to the family of drugs known as a dissociative anesthetics. In recent years, great attention has been paid to the investigation of the substances that have been abused, including PCP. PCP is the synthetic drug with stimulant and hallucinogens effects (street name ?angel dust?) and it's situated on the Schedule Substances List, in Serbia and worldwide. In the beginning, PCP has been sold in pharmacies as local anesthetic, but very quickly it was pulled from sale because of the unwanted effects on consumer?s health causing psychoactive addiction. Taking into the account that today a great attention has been given to the substances that are subject of abuse, in this paper, biological and pharmacological effect of PCP and it's derivative is described. It is shown that PCP is antagonist of N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) and that it causes antiglutamateric hallucinations. Unlike BTCP which agonist is NMDA receptor and is obtained by modifying the structure of PCP. This paper presents a PCP metabolism and provides an overview of the methods for their identification and quantification in the biological samples. Immunological tests of PCP in the biological samples can provide a quick but wrong result because of the possible interference with the other substances of abuse as opposed to instrumental methods. Based on the presented method and the results it was concluded that the method of choice for the examinations of biological samples for the presence of PCP is gas chromatography in combination with mass spectroscopy.