How Captagon Became a Favorite Drug of Hezbollah Traffickers

Captagon several years ago became a favorite drug of Hezbollah traffickers, rivaling heroin and cocaine in profitability. The Washington Post explored Hezbollah’s drug trade back in 2020: “Hezbollah operatives seen behind spike in drug trafficking, analysts say,” by Joby Warrick and Souad Mekhennet, Washington Post, August 4, 2020:

Among the varieties of drugs associated with Hezbollah, Captagon is a relative newcomer, one that is linked to a previous episode of maximum stress for the group….

Hezbollah was still smarting from its 2006 defeat at the hands of Israel, in which much of its expensive arsenal was destroyed by the IDF, when Iran generously supplied its favorite terror group with a way to make good money. It send Hezbollah the equipment to manufacture Captagon, a psychotropic stimulant formerly used to combat depression. This was the beginning of Hezbollah’s involvement in the manufacture and sale of Captagon, which has become a major part of its drug trafficking business.

“The extent of Hezbollah’s control over the Syrian Captagon factories is not publicly known. Up to now, the facilities have been “run under the protection of Hezbollah, or run by affiliates with Hezbollah turning a blind eye and getting a share of the profits,” a senior U.S. law enforcement official said.

It hardly matters whether it is Hezbollah itself, or its affiliates, who deal in Captagon; Hezbollah still makes a profit, whether it manufactures and sells the drug on its own, or if it must share part of the profits with others – “affiliates” – who are involved in the distribution and sale. Hezbollah remains the largest maker by far of this amphetamine, Captagon which, long ago taken off the market for legitimate drugs, has found a new life as an illegal substance.

The drug is little known in the United States, but the smugglers have found an eager market closer to home. Captagon users say the drug makes them feel euphoric and energetic, and the stimulant has become enormously popular within the club cultures of several Middle Eastern countries, particularly in the Persian Gulf states. In addition, Islamic State commanders notoriously used Captagon as a morale booster for fighters heading into battle, thus bolstering its reputation as the “jihadi drug.”

Captagon is not used just to “feel good” by individual users, but also has been given to the fighters of the Islamic State by its commanders, so that they will feel “euphoric and energetic,” which bolsters their fighting spirit. While Shi’a Hezbollah is ideologically the enemy of the uber-Sunni takfiris of the Islamic State, it takes the position that “business is business” and has no qualms about selling drugs, including Captagon, to ISIS, whose members would on other occasions think nothing of decapitating the Shi’a of Hezbollah for being the “worst kind of Infidels.”

But more recently, trafficking in Captagon appears to be strictly about generating profits, officials say. While Islamic State fighters sometimes sold the drug for cash during the waning days of the group’s self-proclaimed caliphate, the making and marketing of Captagon is a costly and sophisticated enterprise that requires dedicated factories as well as extensive networks for moving the drug across international borders.

All the required ingredients currently exist in northwestern Syria, along with paper manufacturers who make giant paper rolls of the type used to hide the tons of Captagon discovered at Salerno, said Armand Chouet, a Paris-based imagery analyst and author of a report that analyzed the movement of the drugs from Syria to Italy’s west coast….

Assad is grateful for the support he has received, during his nine-year-long civil war, from both Iran and Hezbollah, and would do nothing to interfere with their money-making drug trade. Syria itself does not deal in drugs, but it provides the sanctuary needed for Captagon factories to manufacture, and then to safely transport the drug, both overland and from the Syrian port at Latakia, to its major markets in Europe and in the Gulf Arab states, where rich young Arabs find it very much to their taste; it’s now part of their “club culture.”

Hezbollah has shown itself able to deal with financial disarray. When it needed more money for its operations in Syria and Yemen, it managed to increase the sales of its mainstay drugs, cocaine and heroin. It also branched out into massive sales of a new product, the amphetamine Captagon. This allowed the terror group to replace some – no one outside the group knows how much — of the $800-million-dollar annual subsidy that it had been receiving from Iran, and that Tehran had slashed following the deepening of its own economic woes.

Now, when Hezbollah ion the brink of war with Israel, it’s a good time for Western governments to emphasize the role of the terror group as a drug-trafficking criminal enterprise. The Western nations can spell out in great detail, for the UN (and on social media) how Hezbollah acquires its drugs, whether by growing or buying or manufacturing them, then transports them for sale around the world, but especially in Western Europe, and in the Gulf Arab states. Imagine the effect, on Western publics, of the display of photographs of notorious Hezbollah drug-buying sites in Medellin, Colombia, of the group’s Captagon factories in Syria, and of tons of cocaine and heroin seized from Hezbollah trucks, ships, and planes; these incriminating visuals could have a startling, and salutary, effect, on public opinion.

Portrayed, accurately, as a criminal gang of drug traffickers, and one which has not hesitated to sell its wares to fellow Muslims, Hezbollah can be accused of violating the Islamic prohibition on drugs and, what is especially intolerable for the umma, of encouraging fellow Muslims – Sunnis in the Gulf — to become addicted to Captagon. And as for the non-Muslim addicts for whom Hezbollah acts as a supplier, Western nations, too, can be informed that as early as the mid-1990s— as we saw earlier — Hezbollah’s top “spiritual” advisers were quietly condoning drug dealing, telling members that narcotics trafficking was “morally acceptable if the drugs are sold to Western infidels as part of a war against the enemies of Islam,” according to a declassified 1994 report. Imagine the effect such information could have on the views of so many in the West, now made keenly aware of the drug-trafficking jihadis of Hezbollah, whose sales – of cocaine, heroin, Captagon and other insidious mind-altering wares — have been Islamically justified as a means of weakening Infidel lands from within.