How a banned medicine became the Middle East’s drug of choice
The region is threatened by a flood of Captagon amphetamines made in some of its most troubled countries
Captagon, the synthetic amphetamine long associated with the Syrian civil war, has become the Middle East’s most popular drug.
Huge quantities of the small, off-white pills are still made in Syria, but experts say production is spilling over the borders into Lebanon and Jordan.
And where the pills were once taken by fighters going to the front lines, traffickers are now flooding the region with cheap but dangerous drugs.
Saudi Arabia is training working dogs to detect increasingly complex attempts to smuggle Captagon into the region’s biggest market.
The kingdom recently banned agricultural imports from Lebanon to rein in traffickers.
But producers in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, out of the security forces’ reach, boast of how easily they can produce large quantities of the pills, and how much money they can make.
The Black Desert, an arid expanse between Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia, is the centre of a smuggling network for Syrian and Jordanian drugs.
Iraq has long been awash with Iranian-made crystal meth, but law enforcement are now seizing Captagon in large quantities.
Officials say the pills are the second most popular drug in the country and the security forces are struggling to keep up with trafficking that they say could be fuelling terrorism.
In Egypt, where the recreational use of hashish was once tolerated, veteran drug dealers say the influx of new synthetic drugs has changed habits and is fuelling crime.
First synthesised in the 1960s,
Captagon was used as a treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
It contained a stimulant called fenethylline, banned in the mid-1980s because of its side effects.
“The fenethylline stock that remained in Europe was largely destroyed, but part of it was trafficked and sold on the black market in the Middle East,” said Laurent Laniel, principal scientific analyst at the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction.
When that stock ran out, amphetamines were used as a replacement for fenethylline in the pills, giving rise to the drug that is popular today.
“The name survived. Captagon – now an illicit product, containing an illicit drug – was trafficked to what appeared to be its largest markets: the Middle East, the Arabian Peninsula and apparently Saudi Arabia,” Mr Laniel told The National.
Criminal gangs from Bulgaria and Turkey helped to introduce the drug in the region and production moved to the Levant after laboratories in Eastern Europe and Turkey closed.
In 2015, a Saudi citizen was caught at a Lebanese airport trying to smuggle two tonnes of Captagon pills in a private jet.
“Fairly serious organised criminals from Lebanon were seen in the airport on the same day. There is speculation that these criminals were delivering the Captagon,” Mr Laniel said.
The similarities in production equipment and methods led experts to believe that European criminals were playing a role in Lebanon’s drugs trade.
Several intercepted shipments, including what is thought to be a world-record $1 billion seizure in Italy, were traced to territory controlled by the Syrian government and Iran-backed Hezbollah.
Ian Larson, an analyst at social enterprise the Centre for Operational Analysis and Research, said: “Most of the primary centres of Captagon production are under the control of Damascus. Many are Assad regime strongholds.
“The primary export channels for industrial-scale production are ports controlled by regime officials.
“Lebanon, like Syria, has experienced total economic devastation. The proliferation of the drug economy in recent years is a response to the country’s economic destitution.”
While there is no hard evidence that connects senior Syrian government officials to the trade, Mr Larson and others say they must be aware.
“Much of the evidence is circumstantial, but it is compelling,” Mr Larson said.
Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine and British newspaper The Times alleged that Samer Al Assad, a cousin of Syria’s leader, runs several factories.
Jalel Harchaoui, a senior fellow at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime, said Syria was unable to stop the trade while also dealing with conflicts.
“That is not necessarily to say that the very tip of the Syrian pyramid – Bashar Al Assad and his closest circle – benefit directly from the trade. But lower rungs in their own security sector are assuredly corrupt,” he said.
There is little data on Middle East Captagon use, but the region accounted for half of all global amphetamine seizures in 2019, according to this year’s UN World Drugs Report.
It is clear that most of the Captagon consumed in the region is produced in the region, “in particular in Lebanon and Syria”, said Dr Thomas Pietschmann, a senior UN drug research officer.
Shipments are now being sent to Europe from Lebanon and Syria, then on to Saudi Arabia so as not to arouse suspicion, Dr Pietschmann said.
Most pills sold as Captagon contain other amphetamines that are easier to produce.
“You don’t know what’s inside,” Dr Pietschmann said. “It is mixed with all kinds of substances.”
These discrepancies mean Captagon can act as a gateway to more addictive substances.
“This is what we are really afraid of,” Dr Pietschmann said. “There needs to be more information. We need to stop treating it as a taboo.
“It’s a problem of health and crime and we need to talk honestly about it and try to produce better information to understand what’s going on.”