LAUSR

MDMA and sildenafil are two examples among many substances consumed in "raves", as well as in other types of "recreative" social events nowadays. During the first six months of 2017, five cases of supposedly MDMA tablets seized by local law enforcement forces in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, and brought to our forensic laboratory for examination, attracted our attention among dozens of others, as the tablets apprehended in these cases were, in fact, colorfully painted versions of genuine, pentagon-shaped, sildenafil tablets, freely available for sale in local pharmacies and drugstores. Physical profiling, together with ATR-FTIR spectral matching, multi-component/deconvolution analysis and correlation were employed to prove that these tablets were genuine sildenafil tablets from a specific manufacturer, painted in a colorful way so that they could be marketed as MDMA tablets to unsuspecting buyers.