What will Syria do about Captagon, the Jihadist Drug?

Despite outrage against me at the time, discoveries now confirm the horrific truth of what I wrote about Captagon exactly one year ago.

You can listen to me read this essay here:

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Syria's regime is blamed for the rise of Captagon abuse across the region. (Getty Images: Thierry Monasse)

Not long after the horrific October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, I wrote an essay titled Captagon, the ‘jihad’ drug. After researching the drug, I was shocked by what I discovered, and knew I had to share it.

To recap, Captagon was first produced in the West, in the 1960s, to treat hyperactivity in children, narcolepsy, and depression, but was banned in most countries by the 1980s due to its addictive properties². It was then smuggled to the Middle East where it grew in popularity, with jihadists using it as a stimulant to aid in combat.

Surely, it was a terrible irony that a drug first manufactured to pacify unruly children was now being used to incite terrorists to violence.

Not only that, but from Syria to Lebanon to Gaza, Captagon had destroyed the lives of countless youth who became addicted to what has been called the “poor man’s drug”.

But for Assad’s regime, Captagon was gold. Analysts estimate the drug “raked in $5 billion per year from the trade, dwarfing Syria's official budget and making it a vital lifeline for the bankrupted state.” To put in another way, Captagon is ‘worth approximately three times the combined trade of the Mexican (drug) cartels.’

The minute I published my article about Captagon, the backlash started. Angry emails and comments, accusing me of spreading conspiracy theories and telling me they were unsubscribing.

Comments such as: Really Karen? This is your contribution to the cause of justifying an ongoing Genocide? … Your information to spread the image of "terrorists" (and that the directives of H@mas are inspired from Hitler?

And: Just unsubscribed because of your evil, nutjob, head-up-ass support of Israeli genocide on the Palestinians. In their public response to condemn this massacre, actual independent minded conservatives who truly support freedom and democracy, are now easily distinguished from right wing authoritarian bobble-heads like yourself. This is going to separate a lot of wheat from chaff. And you, are chaff..

I don’t much care what people say about me. However, what I found so disturbing—and what those comments revealed—was how Oct 7th emboldened people, not, as you would expect, to stand with Israel, the nation that was attacked, but to side with terrorists. Like the comment above, to start putting the word ‘terrorist’ in quotes. And then, as the hate intensified and the boldness grew, to even start calling terrorists “freedom fighters” and the Israelis who were fighting them “Nazis”.

All I had done was to write an article about a horrific drug that Hamas leaders were giving young men to use, knowing it would take away any last inhibitions they might have to commit the brutal acts of torture and death that they so proudly shared with the world on Oct 7th. I even tried to bring some humanity to these young men who had been indoctrinated from birth and so vilely manipulated by those above them. You can hear the madness in the chilling recording of a Hamas terrorist boasting to his parents about slaughtering 10 Jews “with my own hands”, excitedly telling them "Your son is a hero! Kill, kill, kill!"

If Westerners refused to accept the fact that Captagon had been used on Oct 7th to turn young men into demonic monsters—even worse than they already were—to ensure they would commit the most heinous acts of violence known to man, what hope was there that Westerners would accept any other facts down the line. We saw that people wanted to believe Hamas. They were ripe to accept Hamas’s narrative, originally invented by Yassar Arafat, and spread by a complicit media to an eager public who was just waiting for the excuse they needed to express their own hatred of Jews.

Now that Assad’s regime has fallen and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) has promised (for a gullible West) to have put their jihadist ways behind them, what will happen with Captagon?

We can look to the Taliban in Afghanistan for answers, keeping in mind that Afghanistan produces 85% of the world’s heroin. According to the Atlantic Council, in August 2022:

Soon after taking power last August, the Taliban vowed to crack down on narcotics. Fast forward to April of this year, and they seemed to make good on that promise, issuing a decree that unequivocally banned the production and sale of illicit drugs.

Unfortunately, that decree has been inadequately enforced, and Afghanistan’s drug trade is booming under Taliban rule.

It will be hard, if not impossible, for the regime to stamp out an industry which provides so many poor Afghans with a livelihood, especially amid the extreme economic and humanitarian crisis which has overtaken the country since last August. Afghanistan’s drug economy expanded dramatically after the US- and NATO-led invasion in 2001. The amount of land under poppy cultivation almost tripled between 2002 and 2020, and the country also started to produce cheap methamphetamine using an abundant local plant—ephedra.

This is a blight on the US and NATO that no one really wants to talk about. Under the leadership of the United States, Afghanistan became the world's biggest opium producer and a major source for heroin in Europe and Asia.

We sure do love our drugs in the Free World, don’t we, and we will get them any way we can, be it legal or illegal. At the same time, we self-righteously condemn the countries that provide us with those drugs.

Because I write facts, not feelings, by the end of 2023, reports were coming out of Afghanistan that since the Taliban takeover, poppy cultivation had dropped by an estimated 95%.

On the other hand, this meant that farmer's incomes had fallen by 92%, from an estimated $1.36 billion to $110 million. Worries were that if the Taliban’s ban on poppy growth remained in place, it would demonstrate the regime’s strength but also worsen rural poverty, increase dissatisfaction among landholders and spur political instability.

It’s hard to imagine what that would be like if suddenly, within one year, the United States’ major source of income fell by 95% and the income of those who worked in that sector fell by 92%. It would destroy our country.

But better them than us. The fact is, in this fallen world, the weak always serve the strong.

Like the Taliban, Syria’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has vowed to destroy the Captagon trade.

HTS spokesperson Ahmed Abu Yakin says “a massive underground stash of Captagon was found just days after the rebel group's takeover. The pills stuffed into large stacks of household volt regulator kits ready for shipment.”

We have seen online the burning of what we are told are sacks of Captagon pills.

Yakin accused the Assad regime of only caring about money and not about the generation of young people who had become enslaved to this drug.

"We will destroy it all," Yakin said. "We will eliminate anything that has to do with drugs, and anything that has to do with the criminal Assad regime."

Well, that’s one terrorist statement I sure do agree with.

But again, even if they accomplish this goal, the downside is it will cause immeasurable suffering for the Syrian people who have come to depend on it as a source of income to survive. This is another irony of the evil drug trade. It’s bad enough that it exists but try to take it away and it wreaks havoc at every level of society because billions of people depend on drugs, either as a source of income, or to manage pain, illness, mental stress, and the really bad one—addiction.

Syria’s entire economy, its ability to survive as a nation, is built on Captagon. Either HTS will continue producing it and try to hide the fact, or it will crack down as the Taliban did (and I am sure we don’t know the details of what really goes on in Afghanistan either). This will further destabilize the country, inevitably leading to harsher punishments, like cutting off hands in the public square, and so forth.

To our shame, we in the West rely on poorer countries to manufacture the products we crave. From far away, we can disassociate ourselves from the horrors of what goes on in those squalid lands. Suddenly, like magic, products arrive—literally on our doorsteps now, thanks to Covid and the rise of Amazon—and we can enjoy them without thinking of how they got there. Everything from the lithium batteries in our phones and cars, etc., to the drugs we consume; we turn a blind eye to the journey they make to reach our hands. Everyone depends on this horrific chain. We’re in so deep; nobody knows how to get out of it.

But let’s ask a difficult question. If we could get out of it, if we knew we could end it all tomorrow, but it would mean returning to the days before we had all these modern conveniences, would we, do it? Of course not. Because that, too, would cause worldwide devastation. We really did take a wrong turn somewhere.

Drugs were first introduced on a large scale at the same time marketing became a method for influencing, first Americans, and then the world, to buy stuff they didn’t need, but that the masses were all told they had to have in order to be happy and healthy.

We now live in a world where most people take some sort of drug that they firmly do believe will make them healthier and/or happier. And that goes for those who get their drugs from the corner pharmacy as well as those who get their drugs from the corner drug dealer. The drug lords will capture you however they can, it doesn’t really matter.

Just like heroin, fentanyl, and now captagon, and all the other products we consume, many of the evils we battle in “third world countries” came about because of our own, insatiable addictions. Except, as I just wrote in The Lost Girls and Boys, the more we give in to our addictions, believing the lies we’ve been told that they will bring us health and happiness, the more unhealthy and unhappy we become.

It is now popular among conservatives to proclaim they are “isolationists”. Most notably those of the “Christ is King” Christian Nationalist movement and who profess their hatred of Israel quite proudly. It’s not our responsibility to help other countries, they say. We believe in “America First”. This is always followed by demonization of the one tiny country Israel and the exclamation that we must stop funding it.

Of course, as Americans we should support American first. However, imagine the arrogance and ignorance it takes to therefore conclude that we should be isolationists and not fund or help other countries. In our modern world where we no longer merely depend on our little village but depend on other nations and they depend on us, it’s impossible to isolate ourselves. If we just consider the way we now communicate in seconds across the planet and to outer space, it’s a ludicrous idea.

But that’s why this new breed of conservatives can abandon American hostages in Gaza. It’s not their problem. They don’t see how disastrous this attitude can be for them, personally; that it might affect, let’s say, their son who lives in a foreign country whose government, seeing the weak response of the US in the hostage crisis in Gaza, might now think it can do whatever it wants to American citizens because no one will come to their rescue. I wonder how these isolationists would feel if it was suddenly their child being held as a hostage.

They can demand lithium batteries from slaves in African countries and still claim to be “isolationists” when it suits them. They must have their batteries, but they don’t have to care about the people in the countries those batteries come from.

I suppose they won’t mind when they become so isolated they can no longer take that yearly vacation to Jamaica and stay in that 5 Star hotel and be waited on hand and foot by those “natives”.

I mean, do they think these things through?

Isolationists complain about the United States selling weapons to Israel—how dare we. They would be surprised to know that the country buying the most weapons from the United States is Saudi Arabia while India is the largest importer of weapons worldwide.

And yet, the US administration prevents investigations into Saudi Arabia, even though it uses American‐​made weapons to commit human rights abuses in Yemen, funds unsavory extremist groups, and opposes U.S. diplomacy abroad.

Oddly enough, nobody is protesting against arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Israel is the devil, as always.

Look at the chart below of the world’s biggest arms importers. Israel isn’t even on it.

As nations, as people, we are inextricably linked to one another, and we cannot get out of it. To talk about isolation is absurd. Those who promote such stupidity, the “Christ is King” Christian Nationalists, know this. They use it to incite hatred toward Israel.

There is something seriously wrong with this constant attack on Israel as the scapegoat for larger problems for which we refuse to acknowledge our own responsibility. And no, we can’t just put it on our government and Israel as these people try to do. More stupidity.

Heroin isn’t grown and exported from Israel. Nor is captagon. Nor is fentanyl. If you want to talk about genocide, maybe stick to the deliberate targeting of American youth, the fentanyl epidemic and resulting deaths. That’s certainly not Israel’s fault. It’s our own fault. We did this to ourselves. And the only way to fix it is to first admit it.

Israel is our ally. Our one real friend in the Middle East.

In contrast, researcher and academic Łukasz Kamieński has gone so far as to describe jihadists as "an army of junkies,” due to captagon:

The jihadists fighting in Syria and with ISIS 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."

And yet, these monsters are now “freedom fighters” and Israel has become the terrorist state.

If we can’t even see the difference between friend and foe, if we can no longer even get that right, what hope is there that we can ever get anything else right?

I can say it until I am blue in the face and still, people will refuse to see it.