Many years ago, in Beirut, I learned the first of many lessons about the Assad regime’s constructed counternarcotics narrative — something that simultaneously sustained the regime’s internal power structure and also fueled its very collapse.
I was conducting some final fieldwork on a little-known (at least at that time) drug trade in an amphetamine-type stimulant called Captagon, which was quickly gaining popularity in the Middle East. The trip was part of a policy report that was initially designed to explore the relationship between the Islamic State group and the Captagon trade but evolved into a broader examination of other actors such as the Assad regime, its cronies and Hezbollah.
Captagon’s production hub was primarily anchored in Syria and Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley, in areas that were either prohibited or difficult to access for a team of researchers with a tiny project budget, no security and a generous record of public critique against the Assad regime. So Beirut it was, a city on the fringes but offering a treasure trove of information. Our trip would feature a tour of meetings with university academics, health care and counternarcotics practitioners, political analysts and governmental officials. We would also co-organize a private workshop with a local partner organization where we would present findings on the Captagon trade and foster an honest, substantive discussion on the actors involved. Or so we thought.
The morning of our workshop, I was greeted in the conference hotel lobby by a middle-aged man lingering by the coffee and water station. “We took a taxi from Damascus!” he exclaimed, as my eyes drifted to his name card, which read “Ministry of Health — Syrian Arab Republic.” I suddenly realized that there was a last-minute guest added to the participant list, likely by the local co-host, to the surprise and shock of my research team. I hoped that he wouldn’t know that I was one of the authors of the translated draft report he was holding in his right hand — a draft that cited multiple instances of regime complicity in the illicit trade of drugs like hashish and Captagon. But he did, remarking with a disconcerting smile: “I read your report. I have thoughts.” I noticed the draft in his hand had handwritten notes in red pen. “Why don’t you extend your trip and come to Damascus? It is a short drive, about two hours. I can arrange meetings with ministry officials to discuss your findings.” My heart was in my throat, but I managed to nod, hoping he was at the wrong conference. He was not.
After dumping my coffee in the trash — that was enough adrenaline for the morning — and entering the conference area, I encountered my next surprise. On the right leg of the U-shaped conference table, Mr. “Why don’t you come to Damascus” was seated next to a small handful of Hezbollah officials who were, similarly, not on the original participant list. Across from them was a line of academics, activists and analysts, either pale as ghosts or amused by the irony of being stuck in a half-day workshop about Captagon with the trade’s implicated actors. Suddenly, the Syrian Ministry of Health representative took to the center of the room with a microphone. He gestured to the technical assistant to display his slideshow “He’s speaking?” my research team murmured to our co-host. “Yes, just some brief remarks to frame the discussion — they said just five minutes.”
I’ll never remember exactly how long the Ministry of Health official spoke. The “opening remarks” were likely around an hour, but it felt like an eternity as a collection of academics, regional experts, health care practitioners and humanitarian workers were lectured by a governmental official about an illicit trade that their government, its ruling family and security partners systematically sponsored. The official breezed through slides about the regime’s strong track record of imprisoning drug-dependent individuals, how the country was a “victim” of the drug trade, and how “terrorist rebels” from opposition-held areas were the primary agents seeking to undermine stability and regional order. The presentation ended with no questions and successfully ran out the clock to lunchtime, giving my team under an hour to present our very different findings.
In the moment, it was mortifying. But looking back, the experience was an important lesson that put the regime’s masterful gaslighting about counternarcotics on full display. It was the first time that I had a front-row seat to the regime’s developing narrative about the Captagon trade — an illicit enterprise that the regime built into a powerful industry that loosely held its power structure together over the next six years but also contributed to its swift downfall.
While there were signs of the regime’s involvement in Captagon in the mid-2010s, the wake-up call for most regional and international actors came in July 2020, after a consignment of 84 million Captagon pills dispatched from Syria to Italy’s Port of Salerno was seized. The seizure was riddled with signs that the regime, rather than a nonstate actor like the Islamic State group, was the primary sponsor behind the Captagon trade.
The consignment was dispatched from a port, Latakia, that only the regime and Iran-aligned actors could access. The consignment was the largest amphetamine-type drug seizure in history at the time, reflecting industrial-scale manufacturing capacity that no ragtag nonstate actor had in Syria. The industrial-scale cardboard cylinders, as well as the commercial shipping vessels used to conceal the pills, were traced to key regime-aligned business figures. The floodgates were opened: Each day, millions of Captagon pills were flowing overland and into ports across the Gulf, North Africa, the Levant, southern and northern Europe, and even as far as Southeast Asia, as the regime unlocked a new way to generate alternative revenue streams on the cheap, without any interference.
Even when the Captagon trade reached peak levels of production and circulation in 2022, Damascus doubled down on efforts to control the narrative around the trade, even weaponizing it to their advantage. The regime knew what it was doing by pumping huge amounts of cheap, addictive stimulants into neighboring countries, sparking both a drug dependency crisis and a challenge to local rule of law. There was a kinetic element added to smuggling operations, too. Captagon smugglers would often engage in violent (and sometimes fatal) clashes with security forces along Syria’s borders as well as incorporate illicit arms into Captagon trafficking routes.
While this created frustration among regional players like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Turkey and Kuwait — the regime’s target audiences, where the spigot of political and economic relations with Syria had otherwise run dry — it also created a bargaining chip. This set the stage for the regime to feature Captagon as a primary agenda item in on-again, off-again normalization discussions. This was the case in the spring and summer of 2023, when Captagon was front-loaded in talks between Syria and its neighbors for rapprochement efforts. In my discussions with officials from the Gulf, many remarked how officials from Damascus explicitly acknowledged the regime’s role in sponsoring the illicit Captagon trade behind closed doors. It was a flex, a message to their counterparts that they held all the cards: If countries wished for them to turn off the taps on Captagon, they had to quickly meet regime demands.
While there were clear incentives for the regime to curb the Captagon trade, Damascus still wanted to have its cake and eat it. Regime officials manipulated the arrest and seizure data to their advantage, tweaking the numbers to create the impression that the state was cracking down. After all, there was no better way to deliver on promises to be “tough” on Captagon than claiming a 40% increase in arrests or a 60% increase in seizures. This effort to bloat interdiction rates became obvious only to researchers who had more time on their hands. The Captagon Trade Project at the New Lines Institute found several holes in the regime’s emerging campaign, such as the regime’s assertion that it had arrested 851,621 individuals in just the first nine months of 2022 — what would have been over 15% of the adult male population in regime-held areas.
There were questionable seizures that were likely staged to grab headlines, such as the announcement that the regime found “hummus bowls” made with crushed Captagon fashioned into a pasted pottery, something very difficult to achieve with amphetamine powder. The regime also opportunistically engaged in occasional tipoffs, often sending over intelligence to countries about a Captagon consignment, coincidentally right ahead of or on the heels of diplomatic discussions about regional normalization.
And while there had been a downturn in the volume of Captagon seizures in recent years, after peaking in 2022, a string of recent seizures of regime-operated Captagon factories shows that Captagon production capacity was still alive and well into the last hours of the Assad regime’s hold on power. The term “shocked but not surprised” is the best way to describe the feeling of seeing the videos of regime-operated Captagon facilities that flooded out of former regime-held territories on the heels of Assad’s ouster, just days after the opposition’s offensive swept into Damascus.
First came the facility in Latakia, filmed by a local girl in her neighborhood. Her video captured the chaotic scene of a resident-led raid on a local car dealership. Local residents, likely suspicious of Captagon smuggling at this site for years, poured through the Syria Car Trading Company, a site that was owned and operated by Munther al-Assad (a distant cousin of Bashar al-Assad), to find large trunks of Captagon in a van parked in the dealership’s driveway. The pills were disposed of in the street, lining the cracks of the roadway and sidewalks almost like confetti after a parade, and were poured into the street drains.
Then came the industrial-scale manufacturing centers. In Douma, local residents and rescue workers rushed to the local factory for “Captain Korn” chips, only to see the facility lit aflame when opposition forces began closing in on Damascus. Forces entered the facility to find, not a food production line, but one of the largest Captagon facilities seized to date. It was filled with industrial-scale metal ovens, professional laboratory glassware and drums of precursor materials like chloroform, potassium iodide, formaldehyde solution, ammonia solution, acetic acid and hydrochloric acid. In each of the rooms, there were bags filled with thousands of Captagon pills of all different variants — the “Lexus,” the “Ya Msaharni” and the “Lambo.” And it was clear that this wasn’t just a site of production but a laboratory and trafficking center all rolled into one; materials of all sorts used to conceal Captagon from customs were scattered around the premises. Some of the materials, such as custom plastic pebbles and plastic fruit tailored for Captagon smuggling, represented the impressive level of labor and resourcing that was required for this particular Captagon operations hub.
On the outskirts of Damascus just north of Yafur, along the highway to Beirut, another manufacturing site was flagged. An upscale villa perched in the hills contained another industrial-scale manufacturing site. It was an ironic juxtaposition: a chaotic scene of stacked precursor chemicals and mismatched lab equipment all perched beneath sparkling crystal chandeliers. Like Douma, the way that thousands of Captagon pills were scattered across the floor like interchangeable rocks was almost as if the pills were without value — as if they could always produce a few thousand more the next day. It demonstrated the significant weight that regime-aligned actors like Maher al-Assad, Amer Khiti, Taher al-Kayyali and others threw behind Captagon production. They were able to dramatically scale up manufacturing using state tools and impunity, keep it on the cheap and sustain this illicit trade for almost a decade, keeping any outside intervention at bay.
Many have described Captagon as the “glue” that held the regime together, providing revenue for the regime and its state institutions to survive. It was the financial source of the regime’s resiliency, the common wisdom goes. But I like to think of Captagon less like glue and more like Scotch tape.
The regime never funneled its illicit drug revenues into state services, salaries for its soldiers or development projects for its citizens. It was always meant to buttress the comfortable lifestyles of the regime’s inner circle and patronage network. Captagon likely helped furnish Assad family palaces and villas with features such as personal barber chairs, gymnasiums equipped with ballet bars and jacuzzis and the several Lamborghinis that were discovered by residents and opposition forces. It helped Bashar’s cousin Wassim throw elaborate poolside birthday parties for his young son. It financed Burberry polos and the gold-plated office furniture for Hassan Daqqou — who was employed by the Fourth Armored Division, which acted as a parallel military force protecting the regime — and his family. Captagon ultimately empowered the regime’s inner circle to live disconnected from the dire economic realities that touched their fellow Syrians and sustain Assad’s hold on power — until it didn’t.
I now wonder about the role that the trade played in undermining the regime’s survival in the end. As the rebel offensive moved closer to Damascus, Assad engaged in a series of phone calls with regional counterparts begging for assistance against opposition forces but received peanuts in return. It was clear that beyond their ambiguous statements of support for the regime, countries like the UAE, Iran and Iraq — countries that were all considering a slew of avenues for counternarcotics collaboration with the Syrian regime weeks beforehand — had made a conscious decision to sit this one out. Turkey also played a role in giving the offensive the green light in the first place, following frustration with the regime’s unchanging demands.
Syria’s neighbors were simply fed up with the regime’s 13 years of gaslighting, maximalist stance and refusal to compromise. Perhaps the regime’s manipulative narrative about its role in the Captagon trade was one of the final nails in the coffin. The illicit trade that was supposed to create resiliency for the regime — the “glue” to bind it together — instead proved to be a failed bargaining chip that only accelerated the regime’s downfall.
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