The growing availability of new psychoactive substances with unknown toxicity is alarming all over the world. The simplicity of acquiring these drugs of abuse from internet markets has caused an increase in the total number of seizures. We present the first systematic spectroscopic study of methylone and pentylone, which are in the class of synthetic cathinones.

We present the first comprehensive structural study of amphetamine and its derivatives in aqueous solution performed by the methods of VCD, ROA, IR, and Raman spectroscopy including a successful conformational analysis of studied compounds.

Additive manufacturing technologies are considered as a potential way to support individualized pharmacotherapy due to the possibility of the production of small batches of customized tablets characterized by complex structures. We designed five different shapes and analyzed the effect of the surface/mass ratio, the influence of excipients, and storage conditions on the disintegration time of tablets printed using the fused deposition modeling method. As model pharmaceutical active ingredients (APIs), we used paracetamol and domperidone, characterized by different thermal properties, classified into the various Biopharmaceutical Classification System groups. We found that the high surface/mass ratio of the designed tablet shapes together with the addition of mannitol and controlled humidity storage conditions turned out to be crucial for fast tablet’s disintegration. As a result, mean disintegration time was reduced from 5 min 46 s to 2 min 22 s, and from 11 min 43 s to 2 min 25 s for paracetamol- and domperidone-loaded tablets, respectively, fulfilling the European Pharmacopeia requirement for orodispersible tablets (ODTs). The tablet’s immediate release characteristics were confirmed during the dissolution study: over 80% of APIs were released from printlets within 15 min. Thus, this study proved the possibility of using fused deposition modeling for the preparation of ODTs.

New psychoactive substances (NPSs) have become a popular alternative to illicit drugs of abuse. However, to determine their metabolic pathways in the human organism, a detailed knowledge of their structure is crucial. Here, we present a comprehensive spectroscopic structural study of synthetic cathinones (clephedrone, flephedrone, and brephedrone) and their major human metabolites, desmethyl derivatives. Chiral high-performance liquid chromatography was utilized to obtain the individual enantiomers of the parent synthetic cathinones and their assumed major metabolites synthesized de novo. The developed chromatographic method made it possible to obtain the target optically pure substances on a multimilligram scale. Electronic and vibrational circular dichroism, combined with infrared and ultraviolet spectroscopy and supported by DFT calculations, were used to determine their absolute configuration and the chiroptical methods to elucidate their molecular structure in detail. Two stable conformers of each substance were found in aqueous solution. Their relative abundances were estimated based on the Boltzmann distribution and the population weighted spectra were obtained. Very good agreement was achieved between the experimental and simulated spectra, enabling the 3D structures of the studied substances to be determined in aqueous solution.