US set to reveal international strategy to combat Assad regime's Captagon trade

The Biden administration will in the coming weeks issue an international cross-agencies mandate to target the Captagon drug trade in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.

It is not yet entirely clear what the strategy against Assad’s drug empire will look like, but Ethan Goldrich, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Syria and the Levant, indicated at the end of last week that the plan will be delivered in the coming weeks. 

Captagon is a highly addictive amphetamine-type psychoactive stimulant.

Originally developed in Germany for the pharmaceutical giants Degussa Pharma Gruppe in the 1960s for medicinal purposes, the use of Captagon was discontinued in the 1970s due to it containing the outlawed substance fenethylline. 

After the regime of Bashar al-Assad led Syria into a catastrophic civil war, Syria has emerged as the global hub for the illegal stimulant.  80% of the world’s Captagon is produced in Syria.  The Assad regime has come to rely so heavily on the production of Captagon for revenue that Syria is now considered a narco-state.

Assad is using Iranian-backed militias and Hezbollah to aid in the trafficking of the drug, while his cousin Samer Kamal al-Assad and the Fourth Armoured Division of the Syrian Army are said to be in charge of running its production in Latakia province, a regime stronghold.

Syria’s production of Captagon could be worth around $30 billion on its current trajectory, which is almost 50 times the size of Syria’s total legal exports. 

In recent years, authorities across the Middle East and North Africa have seized billions of dollars’ worth of Captagon.  However, the Gulf is the number one destination of Syrian-made Captagon, where it has become a popular party drug among the youth.

This has prompted the US to include the Captagon bill into its $858 billion National Defence Authorisation Act, which seeks to globally coordinate efforts to counter the trafficking of the drug from Syria. 

It is not yet entirely clear what the strategy against Assad’s drug empire will look like, but Ethan Goldrich, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Syria and the Levant, indicated at the end of last week that the plan will be delivered in the coming weeks. 

Such is the extent of Syria’s illicit trading of Captagon that it is believed to have been used by Assad as a bargaining chip in both his rapprochement with the Arab world and potential wider normalisation beyond the region.