Recent advances in electrochemical sensing of cocaine: A review

The consumption of illicit drugs is a worldwide worrying issue that troubles the well-being of society, even in times of pandemic. Cocaine is one of the most used seized drugs in the world. Due to the fast-growing demand for control and legal action against drug abuse, research has been focused on developing an on-site test for the detection of cocaine. Also, determining of cocaine in wastewater is a challenge for drug epidemiology. At this point, many forensic science laboratories require to develop a fast, selective, sensitive, and low-cost methods for cocaine analysis. Electroanalytical techniques can facilitate all these requirements by providing portable and affordable analytical devices with the help of novel bio/nano sensing strategies such as aptasensing. The literature survey concluded that the desirable electrochemical bio/nano sensing systems were fabricated for cocaine detection. In this review, we discuss the environmental effect of cocaine consumption, surface modification strategies for electrochemical bio/nano sensing of cocaine, and its application area such as street samples, biological samples (human serum, urine, and saliva), river water, synthetic sample, etc. In addition, in detail, the properties of modification materials including aptamer, cyclodextrin, MoS2, conductive polymer, complex ligands, carbon nanomaterials, molecular imprinting etc and their surface modification strategies are discussed based on hydrophilicity, selectivity, conductivity, functionality, and surface area/porosity. [Display omitted] •Recently, articles covering the electrochemical bio/nano sensing of cocaine have been carefully researched and discussed.•Electrode modification strategies for cocaine detection are explored for the first time in this review.•Electrode modification strategies are discussed in detail.