Indirect Atomic Absorption Determination of Cocaine via Formation and Liquid‐liquid Extraction of the Iron(III)‐cocaine Complex

The principles of metal‐alkaloid ion‐pair formation and liquid‐liquid extraction are applied to the development of a sensitive and convenient atomic absorption spectrophotometery (AAS) method for the indirect determination of cocaine. In an aqueous medium of 5 M hydrochloric acid, cocaine is protonated and is associated with tetrachloro ferrate (III) anion prior to its extraction into 1,2‐dichloroethane. The critical experimental variables were identified and optimized. The method is simple and reproducible with a detection limit (DL) of 0.1 ng cm−3 cocaine in water, a relative standard deviation of 0.07 (n = 12), and the calibration graph was linear up to 50 ng cm−3 cocaine.