Syrian government largest drug dealer worldwide – VICE
QAMISHLI, Syria (North Press) – A report by VICE argues that Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, and his government should be considered the largest drug dealers worldwide. Syria, the report says, has become a “narco state.”
Most of the drug-related revenue is linked to captagon, an amphetamine pill, which is locally produced and exported.
According to recent estimates, Syria’s captagon industry is valued at $57 billion. Captagon seizures by foreign law enforcement agencies alone were worth $5.7 billion in 2021.
Once linked to armed groups in Syria, such as Islamic State (ISIS), as a method to harden fighters for battle, captagon has become one of the main revenue sources for the country.
The drug is extraordinarily profitable, as it can be cheaply produced in Syria, where it sells for as low as $1 a pill, and sold expensively abroad. Saudi youth buy captagon for as high as $25 a pill.
“Captagon exports represent the single most important contribution to foreign currency earnings for the Syrian economy,” an economist quoted by VICE says.
The amphetamine has found its way into all of Syria’s neighbors thanks to a network of cronies and ubiquitous corruption. Some of it has even been smuggled across the closely-monitored border to Israel.
Israeli authorities arrested on Feb.1 two Syrians trying to smuggle hashish near the town of Druz, in Majdal Shams, north of Golan, southern Syria.
Public Investment
Though part of the captagon is also produced in other areas of Syria, such as Turkish-occupied Afrin, the experts quoted by VICE all agree that most of the revenue of the drug trade enriches the al-Assad government and its allied militias.
The president’s younger brother, Maher al-Assad, who also heads the Syrian army’s 4th Armored Division, has been tied to the trade.
Captagon has become the core glue that ties the “three institutions of the regime’s state together, the regime, the crony elite, and the loyalist security units. Captagon is industrial scale in Syria for a reason: it’s a regime-backed, protected and guaranteed effort. The regime pulls all the strings,” the VICE report says.
“Overwhelmingly revenues from the trade go to the pocket of powerful regime cronies, thugs and Iranian-affiliated militias, the people who are very harmful to the Syrian population, the people with blood on their hands.”
People familiar with the topic worry that the al-Assad government may use also the ubiquitous drug as leverage against rich neighbors hard-hit by captagon epidemics, such Gulf countries.
Unforeseen Side-effects
The experts decry US inaction on this issue. Though the country’s drug-enforcement agency (DEA) has opened offices in neighboring Jordan, which has been hard-hit by the captagon trade, and Washington lawmakers recently passed the ‘Captagon Bill’, aiming to target those who profit off of its trade, little else has been done against the largest drug export worldwide.
“Geopolitically-wise this is enormous, it’s unprecedented in scale,” one expert says, “why is this not being tackled more determinedly?” Part of the answer lies in the little impact captagon has had on the US, unlike the Mexican drug trade.
Yet, for many, this is missing the large-scale impact captagon has had on the region. “In September [of 2022], the State Department’s list of major illicit drug producing countries again failed to include Syria,” one expert says, “despite the fact that it is from Syria that we are seeing the biggest drug production and export in the world.”