Forensic Toxicology Applied In A Crime Scene
We humans were using poison for a quite a long time. The early civilization used poisons in order to murder someone or an animal, prehistoric people in 50,000 BCE applied it to hunting weapons such as arrow, and a spear. Forensic toxicology also known as judicial chemistry, is a study of chemicals, and toxins for investigative purposes. It is applied in various of events in our everyday life, such as investigations on the environmental poisoning and pollution being made, the breathalyzer to check weather if the driver is drunk or not, and drug screened for competitive sports by a private companies. This essay would mainly focus about forensic toxicology being applied in a crime scene and how it can have positive and negative effect morally.
The method of how toxicology is used, is divided into two different ways, quantitative and qualitative inspection. Quantitative is used when the researchers try to find out evidence, and qualitative inspection is used in order to analyze for the presence of a substance in a mixture such as blood and urine. One way of this being done is by using a technique called ‘Thin-Layer Chromatography (TLC)’. However, since the concentration of the substance in forensic toxicology is usually equivalent to the lethal dose, the qualitative test tends to be more important.
It is a field that helps the law administration and contributes protecting human rights by studying and announcing the medical issues that are problematic in the law, and resolves them. Forensic medicine is said to be a medicine of respect for the right to defend the rights so that the rights of people are not unjustly infringed, and the degree of development of forensic medicine depends on the political form, legal structure and national consciousness of the country. It developed in a democratic country that values rights as well as life.
The forensic toxicology is also called "trial chemistry" or "toxicology", which has developed tremendously with the development of chemical analysis techniques and methods. The development situation can be described by how many kinds of substances can be detected in small quantities. Nowadays, it can be measured not to be difficult but usually ng / ml depending on the kind of substance. Ng (nanogram) is one billionth of a gram, 1ng / ml is 0.001ppm, which is the concentration of one gram of a substance dissolved in 1,000 tons of water. The forensic target concentration is usually lethal or at least poisonous, so almost all of the suspected substances at the current level can be detected.
