Triage test and HPLC assay for analysis of vegetamin, an antipsychotic agent, using gastric contents and blood specimens

Vegetamin is an antipsychotic agent composed of phenobarbital, promethazine and chlorpromazine. While phenobarbital can be detected by the Triage kit for screening drugs of abuse, the other two components cannot. We describe here the detection of promethazine and chlorpromazine using either a high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) unit equipped with an ultraviolet, a photodiode array (PDA), or an electrochemical detector (ECD), or gas chromatograph-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). The absorption and mass spectra of promethazine and chlorpromazine were nonspecific, and thus the ECD-HPLC system was best equipped to quantitate these components. Comparison of the chromatograms of blood and gastric contents aids the identification of drug metabolites.