Optimized and validated HPLC methods for compendial quality assessment .2. Opium alkaloids

The main opium alkaloids, such as morphine, codeine and papaverine have their own monographs in the modern pharmacopoeias. This paper includes reversed phase high performance liquid chromatographic procedures for the purity control of the mentioned opiates. The optimized and validated methods make possible the separation of morphine, codeine, thebaine, noscapine, papaverine and the detection of the four opiate impurities in morphine, codeine and papaverine. The limit of detection ranges from 0.01 up to 0.1%. Also, morphine content in codeine chloride can be quantitated with good accuracy.