SAUDIS CRACK DOWN ON SURGE IN CAPTAGON SMUGGLING
▶ The synthetic amphetamine is region’s most in-demand drug
Ahmed was 12 and living in Saudi Arabia when he tried his first Captagon pill.
“It makes you feel like you have a superpower, but if you take the pill a few times, your face starts to change. I have seen it destroy the people around me,” he told The National.
Captagon – a synthetic amphetamine developed in the 1960s as a treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder – has become one of the most widely used drugs among young substance abusers in Saudi Arabia.
“The good ones – the purest ones – are called ‘Lexus’,” said Ahmed, now 26.
Reliable data on the scale of drug use in Saudi Arabia is scarce, but researchers in 2016 estimated that three out of four Saudis being treated for drug addiction had become addicted to amphetamines – mostly Captagon.
“When I was 20, I became an addict. I would take one every three to four days,” he said. It took a year and a half for Ahmed to decide to seek help.
“I felt I didn’t deserve to treat my body like this. I had black eye circles, and my face looked hollow. I looked sick.
“And I started to see how it was ruining the lives of people around me, especially those who take more pills than me, and I feared I would end up like them.”
Consumption in the kingdom has helped Captagon – usually in the form of a small, offwhite pill – become the most in-demand drug in the region. This has prompted a crackdown from Customs authorities to counter rising trafficking.
The kingdom’s drug market is the destination for most of the pills produced in Syria and Lebanon, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s World Drug Report 2021.
The lucrative trade has created an “arms race” between smugglers and Customs officials, with the authorities always on the lookout for innovative smuggling methods.
Saudi Arabia’s authorities say they are intercepting more Captagon than any other drug.
“We stop attempts to smuggle quantities of all sorts of drugs, but the majority are Captagon,” said Abdulmalik Al Obaid, security adviser at the General Authority of Zakat and Tax.
“The weirdest smuggling method we ever caught was an attempt to smuggle 15 million Captagon pills using grapes,” he told The National.
In another foiled attempt, 14 million pills were found hidden inside wooden boxes, along with eight million pills hidden in grain bags.
The authority uses every tool at its disposal – including X-ray scanners and drug detecting dogs – to intercept shipments at more than 35 entry points on the kingdom’s borders, Mr Al Obaid said.
Security officials are also trained to examine and assess travellers’ behaviour.
In 2019 alone, Saudi Arabia
seized almost 146 million of the amphetamine tablets, according to the UNODC report.
While Lebanon and Syria are the most common sources of Captagon tablets in Saudi Arabia, some pills are also manufactured in Jordan, where the authorities in 2018 dismantled a laboratory producing the drug.
The explosion in smuggling led the authorities to take drastic action to prevent more pills from reaching the kingdom.
In April, Saudi Arabia banned the import of agricultural produce from Lebanon, after five million pills were found in a shipment of pomegranates.
The crackdown has forced smugglers to find ever-more creative ways of bringing illicit substances into the country.
In March, 15 people were arrested in Austria in connection with the trafficking of about 10 million Captagon pills.
Police said the drugs were made in Lebanon, then smuggled by sea to Belgium, overland to Austria, with Saudi Arabia the intended destination.
The suspects are alleged to have had drug depots in Germany, as well as in various parts of Austria.
They are alleged to have shipped 25 to 30 tonnes of Captagon tablets from Austria to Saudi Arabia as air freight between 2016 and this year.
The crackdown is also hitting users, who say the price of the drug has doubled since the ban on Lebanese imports.
Before the ban, the average price for one Captagon pill was 60 riyals ($16), while the purer
form – with the street name “Lexus” – went for 120 riyals.
“If you were buying a large quantity – let’s say a bag of 150 pills of ‘Lexus’ – it used to cost 16,000 riyals,” said Ahmed. Now the price is about 32,000 riyals, he said.
A doctor who works mainly with Captagon users in an addiction hospital in Saudi Arabia’s western region, also reported a rise in prices.
“My patients tell me they used to get the tablets for 15 riyals. Now they get them for about 30 riyals,” said the doctor.
The influx of drugs is a serious threat to the health of Saudi Arabia’s young people.
Last year, about 26,000 people tested positive for amphetamine use in the kingdom, said Dr Faisal Albishi, the head of the treatment and rehabilitation committee at the National Committee for Anti-Narcotics.
Dr Albishi said the people who abused amphetamines usually started around the age of 18 and continued to use the drugs until their late 20s or early 30s.
While few users continue past this age, there are exceptions, Dr Albishi said.
“I once had a patient who was
60 and still abused Captagon,” he told The National.
Amphetamine abuse takes a physical and psychological toll on users, he said, with common symptoms that include rapid weight loss, headaches, hypertension and an increased heart rate.
Ahmed said he had watched on, helpless, as his friends’ faces changed, becoming gaunt, with dark circles appearing under their eyes.
Captagon abuse can also cause psychological side effects, such as depression, psychosis, hallucinations and increased aggression, Dr Albishi said.
Hallucinations in particular were widespread among patients, he said.
“You find some patients who will hallucinate then hurt their wives. Some become paranoid, feeling someone is watching them,” Dr Albishi said.
“I had a patient who started breaking all the furniture in his house. He believed there were cameras in the furniture.”
The kingdom’s health authorities advise people struggling with Captagon addiction to get clean with a detox, which lasts two to three weeks.
“The detoxification should ideally be in the hospitals, followed by a rehabilitation programme,” Dr Albishi said.
Rehabilitation programmes are offered in a hospital setting, rehabilitation centre or in outpatient clinics and can take up to a year.
Programmes vary according to the needs of patients, but generally include psychological
treatment, social intervention and religious intervention.
“The main goal of this stage is to rebuild the person from the beginning, to give him a supportive system in the centre or in the hospital,” Dr Albishi said.
But even with treatment, some of the effects of amphetamine abuse can linger long after users quit.
“Amphetamines – like other substances – if one abuses it and then quits, some effects can continue,” Dr Albishi said.
“In the long run, there is a clear effect on brain cells, and it will continue for years.”
While the anti-narcotics department and the Customs authorities work on stopping the pills from entering the kingdom, the committee is working on how to reduce Captagon use in the country.
“In general, addiction is a disorder. For any disorder, we need to provide a good prevention system and good treatment system,” Dr Albishi said.
The prevention strategy works by stopping people from getting into the addiction cycle in the first place.
“One of the main strategies is to concentrate on the role of the family,” he said.
Families have an important role to play in stopping drug use at an early stage.
The committee is running outreach programmes to make families aware of the problem.
“It is good for the family to know the signs and symptoms of amphetamine abuse and for them to look out for them,” Dr Albishi said.
Saudi Arabia’s drug market is the destination for most of the pills produced in Syria and Lebanon, says UN report