Cheap enough!

According to https://harmreductionjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1... mass spec machines are between $5000 and $1m, and commercial labs offer services for between $5 and $100 per sample. Presumably the capital investment of buying a mass spec machine and hiring a technician drop the cost per sample drop lower than $5, as it seems businesses are able to stay profitable charging that amount.

According to Wikipedia, the budget for the safe injection site in the article is $1.2m initial investment and $500k/year operating cost to handle 175k injections per year. Even at $5 a sample that’s $875k a year. So mass spec is actually completely plausible, in both capital investment and operating cost, for the budget of a single injection site at the volume that injection site handles. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insite

That the conservative estimates and some upper bounds for gold standard mass spec are within the actual budgets of individual injection sites is, I feel, justification enough for my glib “cheap enough!” quip above. Of course, we may not need the gold standard. For the limited scope of identifying pharmaceutical chemicals in small doses, there may be cheaper processes that function just as effectively.

DEA budget: $2.4 billion annually.

My high school in a not-wealthy part of Alabama had a dozen of them in their chemistry lab 15 years ago. Can't be that expensive...

A dozen of them? Are you sure they aren't gas chromatographers?

I worked in a well funded private lab and we didn't have "a dozen" of them.

Significantly depends on what kind of MS we are talking. Single quad can be had for well under $100k. Top of the line Orbitrap is ~$1.2 million. Depending on the analytical constraints, I think you could get by with a mid-range triple quad for $200-300k. Although, if you need to do exploratory work, I think everyone should just buy a QE as it is a solid workhorse that can fit most any role.

When a lot of that equipment gets aged out from industrial uses it will be given to universities in still-working order. Biotechs going bust can also be a boon to the second-hand market where state of the art equipment can be had for a song. I know one lab which acquired a piece of equipment that had been used in a background shot of a Jurassic Park movie.

I mean sure, but does it makes sense that a high school would have $1-2M worth of mass spectrometers?

Keep in mind there is significant expense in their upkeep as well.

That's why I guessed they were probably gas chromatographers with wavelength or FID detectors. Those are pretty cheap (gas source, injector and column).

You're probably right. I vaguely remember being told they only worked on volatile compounds.

Also it's going to be a real pain to get the calibration right