Captagon, the 'jihad' drug

How we got to a place where drugs manufactured to pacify unruly children are now being used to incite terrorists to violence.

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A Saudi customs officer opens imported pomegranates, as customs officials foil an attempt to smuggle more than five million Captagon pills they said came via Lebanon, at Jeddah Islamic Port, Saudi Arabia in 2021 [File: Saudi Press Agency via AP] Al Jazeera

Captagon is the name of the drug that we found in the bodies of the terrorists in #Hamas. The same ones that the Islamic State used, even when Islam prohibits it. It was used to commit the atrocities within the framework of the 10/07 invasion. ~ Roni Kaplan, Hispanic spokesperson for the Israeli Army.

A few days ago, I was having coffee with good friends, a young Israeli/American couple. We were talking about October 7th. They both knew people who died on that day. The conversation turned to the drug Captagon and I decided to write about it. I’ve written quite a lot over the past two years about how governments use drugs—both legal and illegal—to manipulate and control the populace. I thought this would be a valuable addition.

I have a deep suspicion of the pharmaceutical industrial complex and its ties to government and how the two benefit one another at the expense of the billions of people that they enslave by the drugs they manufacture. Most people are on some kind of medication and don’t believe they can survive without them. The United States consumes more drugs—legal and illegal—than any other country. Nobody, from politicians and CEOs all the way down to the street dealers, wants to see those profits end.

That is not to say that there aren’t valid uses for drugs. Of course, there are. But it is horrifying to see how profit has become the driving force behind drugs, no different from the other biggest money-makers, weapons manufacturing and human trafficking. I’ve documented this in essays such as Get Ready for Pfizer's "TURBO-CHARGED GUIDED MISSILE" Cancer Drugs and Hustling Humans.

Like so many drugs that end up on the streets, Captagon started out as a legal drug. Captagon was first manufactured by the German company Degussa Pharma Gruppe. They began selling it in the 1960s to treat attention deficit disorders (ADHD).

It was so addictive, however, that the scientific consensus determined that its clinical benefits did not outweigh its risks. With its legal flow cut off, people started manufacturing an illegal version that became especially popular in the Middle East, as reported by the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drugs Addiction in Captagon: Understanding Today's Illicit Market.

Of course, the drug industry, in partnership with the psychiatric industry, certainly didn’t want to lose the revenue that they were getting from captagon. So, they replaced it with Ritalin. Up to 6 million children take psychiatric drugs daily in the United States. Ritalin is the most commonly prescribed medication for ADHD. Because it is a stimulant like cocaine, it may cause undesirable changes in the brain over time. Ritalin is also often abused. Kids learn the art of drug dealing by selling it to each other, along with other drugs in their parents’ medicine cabinet.

Dr. Thomas Szasz tells it like it is, he doesn’t mince his words:

“In social terms, it gives the impression to people that behavioral problems are medical and should be handled with drugs; it imposes a certain stigma on the child, possibly on the family. It medicalizes educational and child-rearing problems, and it may cause biological problems in the person taking the drug. I don’t know if the average person on Main Street realizes that if a 30-year-old man has a pocketful of Ritalin, he can go to jail for years. This is called ‘speed.’ And this is what they give as a treatment to schoolchildren when there’s absolutely no laboratory or medical evidence that they are sick.”

Perhaps one day people will wake up to damage all these drugs have done to our children, but I’m not holding my breath. There is too much money to be made. Too much control to be had. And too many parents eager to believe what the government and the drug companies tell them.

Then, when the drugs are discarded for something new, as in the case of Captagon being discarded for Ritalin, the drugs go underground, and new ways are found to profit from them.

Captagon is now illegal in most countries and is produced primarily for illicit use. Syria is considered to be the world's largest producer of the drug, accounting for about 80% of the global supply. Terrorist groups export the drugs in exchange for weapons and money.

According to an April 2023 CNN article, which was published 6 months before the October 7th attack, “The United Kingdom, which last month imposed new sanctions on Syrians connected to the trade, said the Assad regime has benefited from the captagon trade to the tune of $57 billion. It described it as a ‘financial lifeline’ for Assad that is ‘worth approximately three times the combined trade of the Mexican (drug) cartels.’”

Over a billion pills of captagon were seized in Arab countries and in Asia between 2019–2022.

According to Abdelelah Mohammed Al-Sharif, secretary general of the National Committee for Narcotics Control and assistant director of Anti-Drug and Preventative Affairs, forty percent of drug users between the ages of twelve and twenty-two in Saudi Arabia are addicted to fenethylline, or captagon. By 2017, Captagon was the most popular recreational drug in the Arabian Peninsula.

Prof. Rami Yaka – head of Hebrew University Faculty of Medicine’s School of Pharmacy, who is a researcher on addiction, told The Jerusalem Post:

“…amphetamines – as stimulants – are stronger and more potent than opiates. “Those to take them feel they are the king of the world, with no inhibitions. Opiates make users feel more euphoric and violent, but their motivation to do evil is less than that caused by amphetamines.” He added that the infamous Nazi dictator Adolph Hitler, whose directives have now been adopted by Hamas, regularly consumed a “cocktail” of amphetamines and opiates. 

Gaza emerged as a popular market for the drug, especially because of the young individuals who grew addicted to it. It was a long, torturous road, but eventually the illegal version of the drug first manufactured in Germany ended up in the hands of terrorists in Gaza who went on to commit the heinous crimes of October 7th.

It is thanks to the alliances between governments and terrorist organizations that the production and distribution of captagon has been so successful.

• In October 2015, a member of the Saudi royal family, Prince Abdel Mohsen Bin Walid Bin Abdulaziz, and four others were detained in Beirut on charges of drug trafficking after airport security discovered two tons of Captagon (fenethylline) pills on a private jet scheduled to depart for Riyadh, the Saudi capital.

• Powerful associates of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, are making and selling captagon, an illegal amphetamine, creating a new narcostate on the Mediterranean. An investigation by The New York Times found that “much of the production and distribution is overseen by the Fourth Armored Division of the Syrian Army, an elite unit commanded by Maher al-Assad, the president’s younger brother and one of Syria’s most powerful men”.

• All sides in the Syrian conflict have potentially been involved in manufacturing the drug, including the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah, which is allied to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are also involved in manufacturing the drug.

Although nothing compares to what happened on October 7th, captagon has been associated with some of the worst terrorist attacks across the globe.

• In 2015, more than 120 people have been killed in a series of coordinated terrorist attacks across Paris, including a massacre at a rock concert. Captagon was found in the militants’ hideouts.

• References to the drug were found on a mobile phone used by Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a French-Tunisian who killed eighty-four civilians in Nice on Bastille Day 2016.

• In 2016 a Lebanese drug dealer/terrorist told reporters it’s true that Islamic State (IS) fighters are taking amphetamines to fuel their reign of terror. But they aren’t the only ones “getting high to get violent”.

  "All fighters are taking it. They all have to take it. Maybe their leader, he doesn't take it so he can sleep and wake up as he wishes, but all the fighters take it to be able to go into combat."

Captagon is one important way ISIS and now Hamas manipulate and control young men, turning them into terrorists. Here are four videos giving a bigger picture of what it is like to live in such a nightmarish world.

In the video below, you can see a prison in northern Syria that holds 5,000 suspected Islamic terrorists from dozens of countries that “don’t want them freed but don’t want them back either”. I don’t know if there is any connection between these suspected terrorists and captagon. I would bet yes. The point of sharing it is to give a face to who these people are when the fight has gone out of them, and reality finally sets in.

One young prisoner from Belgium, Abdallah Naaman, shows his horrible injury, where the organs of his stomach are hanging out. Please don’t look if you are queasy about such things. Of course, many regret that they ever signed up for this misery but it is now too late.

Below is a glimpse of life under ISIS, however, you can replace the word ISIS with Hamas, and it will be the same.

Below is a video of Nadia Murad, a Yazidi woman who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2018. Listen to her story and see if it doesn’t remind you of October 7th.

“As you have heard, the night of August 3rd, 2014, everything changed. They came to kidnap, to murder, to rape. This was genocide. It is that simple.’ ~ Nadia Murad

Kurdish survivors from the Syrian city of Kobane reported Islamic State fighters being “filthy, with straggly beards and long black nails. They have lots of pills with them that they all keep taking. It seems to make them more crazy if anything.”

Imagine being captured by such monsters. That is what happened on October 7th. But who could have been prepared for such a level of barbarity. How could anyone do the things that they did?

Below, you can see one example of what the terrorists did. It is not the worst, by any means, but to think there is much, much worse that the public is not being shown is beyond words.

Researcher and academic Łukasz Kamieński went so far as to describe lSIS as "an army of junkies,” due to captagon.

The jihadists fighting in Syria and with ISIS —says Kamieński— are reported to be given large amounts of Captagon. It is said that the drug turns them into ferocious and fearless fighters who easily perpetrate unusual violence. Therefore Captagon is often called a "tablet of horror."

If the frequent use of Captagon among the ranks of Hamas is true, the same can be said of its fighters as Kamieński says of those of ISIS: "They are, in a word, high with two intoxicants: jihad and psychostimulants."

And yet, all over social media, people deny the truth of what happened, they even make fun of the rape victims, calling them liars. There is every reason to believe the horrors of what happened that day and no logical reason not to.

Like this example on the cesspool of hate, X (WARNING: this link has disturbing content so please use discretion):

Israel is the king of propaganda and lies yet chose not to check and see if anyone was raped We all know if they believed there was actual rapes they would have run the tests Also seems unlikely they will stop in the middle of a full-on battle and find time to rape women

At the end of the day, people are going to believe what they want to believe, despite the evidence. If anything, perhaps what I have written here will make people think a bit more about how we got a place where drugs that were first manufactured to pacify unruly children are now being used to incite terrorists to violence.

We better reevaluate our drug use and start saying no to the drug industry that always has a new drug waiting in the wings, with a hundred promises of how it will fix all our problems when so often all it does is create a new nightmare.

Thank you so much for reading and listening. I know this is difficult subject matter. Especially this time of year. God bless and I promise to write something more cheerful next time!