Syria authorities say 1 million captagon pills torched

DAMASCUS: Syria’s new authorities torched a large stockpile of drugs on Wednesday, two security officials told AFP, including one million pills of the amphetamine-like stimulant captagon, whose industrial-scale production flourished under ousted president Bashar al-Assad.

“We found a large quantity of captagon, around one million pills,” said a member of the security forces, who asked to be identified only by his first name, Osama. An AFP journalist saw forces pour fuel over and set fire to a cache of cannabis, the painkiller tramadol and around 50 bags of pink captagon pills in the capital’s security compound.

President Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria was accused by Washington and others of profiteering from the production and sale of the addictive amphetamine-like stimulant commonly known as captagon which became entrenched across the Middle East, from front lines of wars to construction sites and high-end parties.

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The annual trade in captagon is worth billions of dollars a year, experts say, and Western governments had linked the illicit trade in Syria to Assad’s brother, Maher al-Assad, and the Fourth Division of the Syrian army he earlier commanded, according to Reuters.

Bashar Assad’s fall after a lightning rebel offensive has allowed journalists for the first time to start searching in Syria for evidence of the captagon empire.

In the dark, cavernous warehouses at the abandoned site in the city of Douma, fighters who ousted Assad said they found thousands of pills hidden in furniture, fruit, decorative pebbles and voltage stabilizers that Reuters reporters saw stacked on pallets, with a trailer waiting outside.

Many of the pills were stamped with the double crescent logo or the word “Lexus” that identifies captagon pills.

Caroline Rose, director of the New York-based New Lines Institute Captagon Trade Project, said the global trade in captagon has an estimated value of $10 billion and put the ousted Syrian leadership’s annual profit from it at around $2.4 billion.

Rose, whose organisation tracks all publicly recorded captagon seizures and lab raids, said the site seen by Reuters appeared to be one of the biggest captagon labs that has been found.

“It’s very possible that it’s the biggest one that existed in regime-held Syria,” she said.