Crystal structure and analytical profile of 1,2-diphenyl-2-pyrrolidin-1-ylethanone hydrochloride or `α-D2PV': a synthetic cathinone seized by law enforcement, along with its diluent sugar, myo-inositol.

Abstract

A confiscated package of street drugs was characterized by the usual mass spectral (MS) and FT-IR analyses. The confiscated powder material was highly crystalline and was found to consist of two very different species, accidentally of sizes convenient for X-ray diffraction. Thus, one each was selected and redundant complete sets of data were collected at 100 K using Cu Kα radiation. The selected crystals contained: (a) 1,2-diphenyl-2-(pyrrolidin-1-yl)ethanone hydrochloride hemihydrate or 1-(2-oxo-1,2-diphenylethyl)pyrrolidin-1-ium chloride hemihydrate, C₁₈H₂₀NO⁺·Cl^-·0.5H₂O, (I), a synthetic cathinone called `α-D2PV', and (b) the sugar myo-inositol, C₆H₁₂O₆, (II), probably the only instance in which the drug and its diluent have been fully characterized from a single confiscated sample. Moreover, the structural details of both are rather attractive showing: (i) interesting hydrogen bonding observed in pairwise interactions by the drug molecules, mediated by the chloride counter-anions and the waters of crystallization, and (ii) π-π interactions in the case of the phenyl rings of the drug which are of two different types, namely, π-π stacking and edge-to-π. Finally, the inositol crystallizes with Z' = 2 and the resulting diastereoisomers were examined by overlay techniques.