A study of presence of ante-mortem administered drugs and to analyse them in the different stages of insect development

Forensic Entomology, or Medico criminal Entomology, is the science of using insect evidence to uncover circumstances of interest to the law, often related to a crime. Often when the body is decomposed it becomes impossible to sample stomach contents, urine, and blood from the dead body, but it will still be possible to sample from maggots, empty puparia or larval skin cast. Drugs in corpses and carcasses may be accumulated and stored by insects feeding on the tissue. These chemicals can be detected in the insects long after the material they have been feeding on can no longer be analyzed. In the present study chemicals/drugs such as Librium, trade name Diazepam, Prednisolone, Phenobarbitone, D.D. T. etc. have been used to determine their presence in the insect body and hence correlate them to the kind of ante-mortem administered drug or chemical. The study reveals that drugs such as Librium (chlordiazepoxide), Diazepam, Prednisolone and Phenobarbitone can be detected in all the three larval stages, pupal stages and the adult form of the blowflies. Some toxins like D.D.T. cannot be detected beyond the larval stage. The study thus shows that though the drugs and toxins have a marked influence on the developmental stages of the blowflies yet they carry the drugs in to different stages of their growth and hence can act as an indicator of cause of death.