The review is devoted to applications of the rapidly developing method of capillary electrophoresis (CE) in pharmaceutical analysis: from the first experience in the analysis of drugs up to the most recent achievements. The general information concerning the CE method is presented and the application of CE techniques to the determination of parent drugs, detection of impurities, enantioselective separation, analysis of vitamins, and stoichiometry evaluation is described. Special attention is focused on the detection of anions and cations in the course of stoichiometric analysis. Numerous practical approaches and potential applications of CE are considered.The method of capillary electrophoresis (CE) became popular in the early 1980s, when Jorgenson and Lukacs [1,2] demonstrated that the efficacy of electrophoresis can be substantially increased if the process is conducted in quartz capillaries with an internal diameter of 75 mm. These original experiments on the electrophoretic separation of biomolecules in capillaries stimulated extensive research and development of the necessary equipment and instrumentation. A large variety of separation mechanisms allowed the spectrum of CE applications to be expanded to include, in particular, the field of pharmaceutical analysis, where the traditional electrophoresis was used for the separation of macromolecules on a restricted basis because of its semiquantitative character and laborious procedures. The introduction of a capillary format made possible the quantitative and automated analysis of both large and small molecules (even of inorganic compounds).The compositions of drugs are usually analyzed by a set of physical and chemical methods. Pharmacopoeial characteristics such as identity, purity (including enantiomer purity), and quantitative composition of individual components of medicinal preparations since 1970s have been studied using various chromatographic techniques. The physical prin-ciples underlying the CE analysis differ from those of the conventional chromatography, which provided additional possibilities within the framework of routine analysis. It should be noted that CE is still in the state of development of the theory and the approaches to solving problems in various applications. New publications continuously report on considerable achievements and further development of the CE method.The practical suitability of CE has been confirmed by various national and international institutions. In particular, IUPAC issued recommendations in the CE terminology [3]. The theory of CE is included in various pharmacopoeias [4 -6], standard CE techniques are successfully used by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommended CE for the continuous monitoring of pollutants [7], and CE has become an adopted method of in vitro diagnostics in forensic and clinical medicine.By electrophoresis we imply the motion of charged particles with different velocities under the action of electric field, whereby positive ions (c...

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