The official told me that the glut of captagon in Saudi Arabia could not be explained solely as a matter of supply and demand. Rather, there had to be a political motivation behind such high volumes of trafficking to the kingdom. They were being targeted, he said. (This view seemed at odds with that of most Western observers, who see captagon primarily as a source of income for the Assad regime; Michael Kenney, the narcotics expert at the University of Pittsburgh, said that it’s “more about business.”) The political purpose of captagon, the Saudi official said, a bit melodramatically, was to tear at the social fabric of his country, and thereby slow down its progress. To counter this destructive effect, he said, authorities in the kingdom treat addicts with kindness: anyone who admits to a drug dependency can be treated for free at a government clinic, without fear of punishment. Traffickers, however, are put to death.
In October, the Ministry of the Interior announced that twenty-one Saudis had been arrested on suspicion of belonging to a gang that trafficked captagon into the Riyadh region. Sixteen of the suspects were employed at government ministries. Their crimes included transporting drugs “from outside the kingdom” and secretly selling off drugs seized by Saudi authorities. Saudi Arabia is no exception to the rule that drug trafficking cannot thrive without corruption.
The Arab world’s relationship with captagon shows up in unlikely places. Harley Street, in London, is where the most expensive private doctors in the United Kingdom have their offices. In an elegant town house on the street, Bashar al-Assad’s father-in-law, Fawaz Akhras, has a cardiology practice. A few doors down, Sophia Khalique, a general practitioner, runs a clinic with Rameez Ali, a therapist and addiction specialist. Among its clients are Saudi captagon addicts.
Khalique and Ali make an odd pair. On the day I visited, Khalique padded around her giant office in a minidress, fish-net 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 students from the Middle East who have developed captagon habits. Their patients are mostly men aged nineteen to twenty-four. Many of them come to the clinic complaining of severe insomnia. It always takes a few questions to identify the root of this problem: a dependence on stimulants.
“When I speak to the students, they say it’s becoming more and more embedded in their life style in the Middle East,” Ali said, of the drug. Khalique said that some patients, already dependent on amphetamines, come to her hoping for a legal prescription—for, say, attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder medication. “They’re saying they want a study aid,” she told me, raising an eyebrow. Some of these patients, she noted, might indeed have learning difficulties. But the attraction of captagon is often social. In her view, it is often used as a “party drug.”
Ali told me that young Middle Eastern men had frequently spoken to him of taking captagon at private house parties. At high doses, users experience euphoria, but the drug seems low risk and not as overtly haram as alcohol. Habitual users of captagon often develop symptoms such as insomnia, anxiety, depression, and mood swings. Ali was also beginning to hear stories about Syrian captagon being used in tandem with anabolic steroids, to cater to a crossover market of men who want not only to keep awake but also to suppress their appetites and bulk up their bodies. Ali said, “Steroid abuse in the Middle East is huge.”
A disused captagon-pill press stands in the parking lot outside Jordan’s anti-narcotics directorate, in Amman. The device, made of metal, is about the size of a refrigerator, with large buttons in primary colors, like a child’s toy. Jordanian authorities seized the press during a recent raid on a production facility, and placed it outside the directorate as a symbol of the agency’s purpose.
On a cool February morning, the head of the directorate, Lieutenant Colonel Hassan al-Qudah, sat behind a wooden desk, drinking coffee and sucking on a vape, while others in the office smoked cigarettes. (Nicotine is Jordan’s most popular drug.) He said that I’d caught him during the busiest season for trafficking from Syria, and explained that smugglers prefer to cross the desert in winter, when they can use the cover of sandstorms, snow, or fog.
During a snowstorm on January 26, 2022, Syrian traffickers attempted to ferry a huge consignment of captagon pills into Jordan on foot. Jordanian troops opened fire, killing twenty-seven smugglers and wounding several others. That was an unusually bloody clash, but serious engagements occur nearly every month. Syrian smugglers now use a variety of cunning techniques to move their drugs to Jordan, including drones and carrier pigeons, which have been taught to fly with tiny bags of contraband affixed to their legs. More than once in recent months, smugglers have fired consignments of captagon across the border inside surface-to-air missiles fitted with tracking devices that allow criminal colleagues in Jordan to find them after they land.
An international monitor had told me that a smaller amount of drugs had been captured at the border in 2023 than in 2022, suggesting a decrease in trafficking activity. But Qudah said that the volume of seized drugs was an imperfect metric. His ministry preferred to measure trafficking attempts, which, incidentally, were on the rise. “Three attempts weekly, minimum,” he said. “This hasn’t been the case before. It’s much more aggressive now.”
“I can’t tell if it’s still in there or not.”
Cartoon by Avi Steinberg
Moreover, the number of people engaged in such sorties had risen. Before Jordan instituted a shoot-on-sight order against traffickers, in 2022, most attempts to move drugs across the border involved only a handful of people. Now, Qudah said, groups of thirty or forty men were common. A few weeks before our meeting, two hundred and fifty men had crossed the border simultaneously, at different locations; another time, four hundred men had used this strategy. The modus operandi was for cars to transport the drugs to within a mile of the border, where individuals would carry them into Jordan in backpacks. Jordanian forces have infrared cameras that register body heat, but these sometimes fail to spot traffickers—say, during a sandstorm. (A source who knew some of the smugglers said that traffickers had invested in thermal-camouflage suits, to evade infrared detection.) The Jordanians also knew that behind the smugglers carrying backpacks would be a “defensive line” of militiamen with semi-automatic weapons, ready to kill members of border patrols. Often, Qudah said, engagements became “a shoot-out.”
Qudah estimated that four-fifths of the captagon entering Jordan was destined for Saudi Arabia. The rest would remain in Jordan. I asked to see some pills that he had seized. He buzzed his secretary. A minute later, an officer brought in a baggie containing two hundred tan-colored pills printed with interlocking half-moons. That logo, Qudah said, was becoming passé. One popular Syrian variety, he said, now featured a horse’s-head insignia; another, the Lexus logo.
Captagon pills were no longer his sole concern. The same people moving captagon from Syria were now also trafficking crystal meth, which could easily be made in the same factories as captagon, and was far more dangerous. A few years ago, crystal meth in Jordan cost a hundred and forty dollars a gram; now it was fifty-five. A friend in Amman told me that she’d seen crystal meth used at middle-class dinner parties.
I visited a state-sponsored rehabilitation clinic in Amman, where some fifty men were recovering from various addictions. One patient in his thirties, who wore a Hollister hoodie, chain-smoked cigarettes, and shook violently, told me he’d first become a captagon user in Jordan. He then moved to Turkey, where he ran a successful construction business. The captagon boost became insufficient, and he turned to crystal meth. The patient said that he had “lost everything” because of his addiction. In Istanbul, he’d become hooked on crystal meth—in addition to taking three or four captagon pills a day. He’d been arrested and deported to Jordan. The man said that most of the captagon dealers in Istanbul had been Syrian or Jordanian. But Iranian gangs, he said, controlled the crystal-meth trade, to the point that the drug was known locally as “Iranian heroin.”
Around 2015, police forces in Europe and the Middle East began seizing huge consignments of captagon. In November, 2015, Turkish authorities confiscated nearly eleven million tablets hidden inside a shipment of oil filters headed for the Gulf. A month later, Lebanese police found thirty million tablets bound for Egypt, stashed in a shipment of school desks.
Chris Urben worked for the D.E.A. for twenty-five years. Before retiring from the agency, in 2021, he was in the special-operations division, focussing on international threats. Captagon became an area of concern. Starting in 2018, Urben told me, “the U.S. government essentially had an intelligence-gathering effort to determine why we were seeing this massive increase in terms of large seizures of captagon at ports, and who was benefitting.”
