Fairfax, Va. -- When there's a major drug bust anywhere in the world, a sample could be headed back to northern Virginia.

News4’s Julie Carey reported Tuesday that the Drug Enforcement Administration operates a special lab in northern Virginia, and it's at the forefront of the war on drugs.

Located near Dulles International Airport, it's officially called the DEA Special Testing and Research Lab.

Chemists analyze drugs sent in, and they travel the world to help other countries with their drug busts.

Their job is to use chemistry to determine drug-making hot spots so agents can try to shut them down.

In November, forensic chemists from the DEA's special testing and research lab in northern Virginia were at a football-field sized methamphetamine lab uncovered in Indonesia to analyze the drugs.

In March, three chemists headed to Kenya to assist the government there by screening samples from a thousand kilos of cocaine.

When they aren't globetrotting, the chemists are in a lab with sophisticated testing equipment at their fingertips.

The 64 staffers, most of them chemists, are a key source of intelligence for the DEA's agents in this country and around the world. Their research can reveal the most active drug pipelines, manufacturing trends and new drug recipes.

The lab is subdivided into three sections to analyze cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin.

Signatures are specific samples of the drugs from certain geographic areas and are kept on record. The drugs are brought in for testing and processed through high-tech machinery, broken down into chemical components and compared to the signatures.

Solvents trapped in cocaine crystals are separated and their profile comes up on the computer screen.

By analyzing the profile, the chemists said they could tell if the cocaine came from Colombia, Peru or Bolivia.

Heroin comes from one of four areas: Southeast or Southwest Asia, South America or Mexico.

By breaking down the drug, the chemists gain important information when they pinpoint a samples origin.

Because it's synthetic, methamphetamine can't be pinpointed to a particular region. Chemists said it's important to keep track of how meth is being made

And for especially challenging cases, mystery or designer drugs, there is the nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer, which pulls drugs into their molecular parts.

The lab is also used for K-9 training material. It supplies and catalogs the drugs sent to 650 local law enforcement departments to use in training drug sniffing dogs.