A simple and sensitive chemiluminescence (CL) method was developed for direct quantification of oxymorphone, a µ opioid agonist that is approximately 10 times more potent than morphine. In this method, potassium permanganate in polyphosphoric acid was used as CL reagent. Using this method, oxymorphone can be determined over the concentration ranges of 13.5-337.8 ng ml-1 and 0.34-6.76 µg ml-1 with a sampling rate of 45 samples h-1. The limit of detection was 3.5 ng ml-1 (signal to noise =3) and

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... he percentage of relative standard deviations (in 9 replicate measurements) were 3.1% for 135.1 ng ml-1 and 3.6% for 1.4 µg ml-1 oxymorphone. The method is applied to human plasma and synthetic samples. The CL mechanism has been proposed using UV-Vis, fluorescence and CL spectra. In this study, detectability of oxymorphone in some other CL systems such as Ce(IV)-H 2 SO 4 , luminol-H 2 O 2 , Ru(phen) 3 2+-Ce(IV) and permanganate-SO 3 2-is investigated. CL intensities of twelve narcotics or related drugs were also investigated in the proposed CL system.