How Syria became the drug dealer of the Middle East

The official told me that the oversupply of captains in Saudi Arabia cannot be explained by supply and demand alone. Rather, there had to be a political motivation behind such a high volume of human trafficking into the Kingdom. They were targetedhe said. (This view seemed at odds with that of most Western observers, who see Captagon primarily as a source of revenue for the Assad regime; Michael Kenney, the drug expert at the University of Pittsburgh, said that “it's more about business.” .) The political purpose of Captagon, the Saudi official said somewhat melodramatically, was to destroy the social fabric of his country and thereby slow its progress. In order to counteract this destructive effect, the kingdom's authorities have taken a friendly approach to addicts: anyone who admits to drug addiction can be treated free of charge in a state clinic without having to fear punishment. However, human traffickers are executed.

In October, the Interior Ministry announced that 21 Saudis had been arrested on suspicion of belonging to a gang that was smuggling Kapitagon into the Riyadh region. Sixteen of the suspects were employed in ministries. Their crimes included transporting drugs “from outside the kingdom” and secretly selling the drugs confiscated by Saudi authorities. Saudi Arabia is no exception to the rule that the drug trade cannot thrive without corruption.

The Arab world's relationship with Captagon is evident in unlikely places. The most expensive private doctors in the United Kingdom have their practices on Harley Street in London. Bashar al-Assad's father-in-law Fawaz Akhras runs a cardiology practice in an elegant townhouse on the street. A few doors down, Sophia Khalique, a general practitioner, runs a clinic together with Rameez Ali, a therapist and addiction specialist. His customers include Saudi Captagon addicts.

Khalique and Ali are an odd couple. On the day I visited, Khalique strutted around her huge office in a minidress, fishnet tights, and fluffy slippers. Ali was friendly but intense; His forehead bore the mark of frequent prayer. Khalique and Ali have treated hundreds of rich Middle Eastern students who have developed Captagon habits. Her patients are predominantly men between the ages of nineteen and twenty-four. Many of them come to the clinic complaining of severe insomnia. It always takes a few questions to identify the cause of this problem: an addiction to stimulants.

“When I talk to students, they say it is becoming more and more integrated into their lifestyle in the Middle East,” Ali said of the drug. Khalique said some patients who are already addicted to amphetamines come to her hoping to get a legal prescription – for example, for medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. “They say they want a study guide,” she told me, raising an eyebrow. She noted that some of these patients may actually have learning difficulties. But Captagon's appeal is often social. In their opinion, it is often used as a “party drug”.

Ali told me that young Middle Eastern men often spoke to him about taking the lead at private house parties. At high doses, users experience euphoria, but the drug appears to be low-risk and not as overtly haram as alcohol. Habitual users of Captagon often experience symptoms such as insomnia, anxiety, depression, and mood swings. Ali also began hearing stories of Syrian Captagon being used alongside anabolic steroids to cater to a crossover market of men who not only want to stay awake but also suppress their appetite and massage their bodies. Ali said: “Steroid abuse in the Middle East is gigantic.”

A disused pill press sits in the parking lot in front of Jordan's anti-narcotics directorate in Amman. Made of metal, the device is about the size of a refrigerator and features large buttons in primary colors, like a child's toy. Jordanian authorities confiscated the press during a recent raid on a production facility and placed it outside the directorate as a symbol of the agency's goals.

On a chilly February morning, the head of the directorate, Lt. Col. Hassan al-Qudah, sat behind a wooden desk, drinking coffee and sucking on a vaporizer while others in the office smoked cigarettes. (Nicotine is Jordan's most popular drug.) He said I caught him during the peak season of drug smuggling from Syria and explained that smugglers prefer to cross the desert in winter when they can take advantage of the protection of sandstorms, snow, etc. and fog.

During a snowstorm on January 26, 2022, Syrian traffickers attempted to smuggle a huge shipment of Captagon pills into Jordan on foot. Jordanian troops opened fire, killing 27 smugglers and wounding several others. This was an unusually bloody clash, but serious fighting occurs almost every month. Syrian smugglers now use a variety of sophisticated techniques to transport their drugs into Jordan, including drones and carrier pigeons trained to fly with tiny contraband bags attached to their legs. More than once in recent months, smugglers have fired shipments of Captagon across the border using surface-to-air missiles equipped with tracking devices that allow criminal counterparts in Jordan to find them after they land.

An international monitor had told me that a smaller amount of drugs were seized at the border in 2023 than in 2022, indicating a decline in drug trafficking. But Qudah said the amount of drugs seized was an imperfect measure. His ministry preferred to measure human trafficking Trywhich, by the way, were on the rise. “At least three attempts a week,” he said. “It's never been like this. It’s much more aggressive now.”

In addition, the number of people involved in such operations had increased. Before Jordan introduced a shoot-at-arms order against drug traffickers in 2022, most attempts to move drugs across the border involved only a handful of people. Now, said Qudah, groups of thirty or forty men are common. A few weeks before our meeting, two hundred and fifty men had crossed the border at different places at the same time; another time four hundred men had used this strategy. The modus operandi involved cars carrying the drugs within a mile of the border, where they were then transported by individuals in backpacks to Jordan. The Jordanian armed forces have infrared cameras that detect body heat, but these sometimes fail to detect traffickers – such as during a sandstorm. (A source who knew some of the smugglers said that the smugglers had invested in thermal camouflage suits to evade infrared detection.) The Jordanians also knew that behind the smugglers with backpacks was a “defense line” of militiamen with semi-automatic weapons would be prepared to kill border patrol members. Often, Qudah said, engagements turned into “a shootout.”

Qudah estimated that four-fifths of the captains entering Jordan were destined for Saudi Arabia. The rest would remain in Jordan. I wanted to see some pills he had confiscated. He called his secretary. A minute later, an officer brought over a bag containing two hundred brown pills printed with interlocking crescents. This logo, said Qudah, is becoming passé. A popular Syrian variety, he said, now displays a horse's head marking; another, the Lexus logo.

Captagon pills were no longer his only concern. The same people who transported Captagon from Syria were now also trafficking crystal meth, which could easily be manufactured in the same factories as Captagon and was far more dangerous. A few years ago, crystal meth cost $140 per gram in Jordan; now it was fifty-five. A friend in Amman told me that she had seen crystal meth at middle-class dinner parties.

I visited a government-sponsored rehabilitation clinic in Amman where about fifty men were recovering from various addictions. A patient in his 30s, wearing a Hollister hoodie, chain-smoking cigarettes and shaking violently, told me that he first became a Captagon user in Jordan. He then moved to Turkey, where he ran a successful construction company. The Captagon boost was no longer enough and he turned to crystal meth. The patient said he “lost everything” because of his addiction. In Istanbul he had become addicted to crystal meth – in addition to taking three or four Captagon tablets a day. He was arrested and deported to Jordan. The man said that most of the Captagon traders in Istanbul were Syrians or Jordanians. But Iranian gangs, he said, control the crystal meth trade, so the drug is known locally as “Iranian heroin.”

Around 2015, police forces in Europe and the Middle East began seizing huge quantities of Captagon. In November 2015, Turkish authorities seized nearly 11 million tablets hidden in a shipment of oil filters bound for the Gulf. A month later, Lebanese police found thirty million tablets destined for Egypt hidden in a shipment of school desks.

Chris Urben worked for the DEA for 25 years. Before retiring from the agency in 2021, he served in the Special Operations Division, focusing on international threats. Captagon became an area of ​​concern. Urben told me: “As of 2018, the U.S. government had essentially undertaken an intelligence-gathering effort to figure out why we were seeing this massive increase in large Captagon seizures at ports and who was benefiting from them.”