"Fishing" Benzodiazepines from Blood, a Challenge

Benzodiazepines are often involved in crime cases and car accidents. Now we show for the first time how these drugs can be extracted from blood samples using EME. From this research, we have learned two things; (1) specifically how to extract benzodiazepines and (2) more generally how to handle compounds which are very difficult to protonate. The latter knowledge we can take advantage of when developing new applications in the future.