Current trends in rapid electroanalytical screening of date rape drugs in beverages

This review covers the current state of the art about electroanalytical studies focused on drugs used to facilitate sexual assaults. The chemicals that are members of this family and the main target of this review paper are benzodiazepines as a family of molecules, ketamine, gamma-hydroxybutyric acid, fentanyl, and some of the drugs categorized as new psychoactive substances (NPS). Most of the research in this area has been published within the last 10 years. Given the need for on-the-spot date rape drugs detection, we have emphasized sensing scenarios that have been developed and validated using real samples, soft and hard drinks. In the background, we also discuss some of the works focused on body fluids, which could be also applied to the soft and hard drinks analysis. Following a critical discussion of the current state of the art, we present a section outlining future directions along with the highlighted existing knowledge gap. [Display omitted] •Benzodiazepines, ketamine, gamma-hydroxybutyric acid, and fentanyl are the key analytes.•Benzodiazepines are the most frequently used and studied date rape drugs.•Benzodiazepine electrochemical detection is mostly based on direct redox reactions.•Gamma-hydroxybutyric acid electroanalytical detection protocols are missing.•Soft and hard drinks electrochemical profiling is a future direction.