Syria Intensifies Fight Against Drug Trafficking with 200,000 Captagon Pill Seizure
LONDON — Syrian authorities confiscated 200,000 captagon pills during a raid on a criminal network in the southern province of Daraa, near the Jordanian border, the Syrian Arab News Agency reported Thursday.
The Drug Enforcement Administration also recovered six balloons used to smuggle narcotics across the region.
Captagon, a synthetic amphetamine-type drug, remains a dominant narcotic in the Middle East despite large-scale seizures by Syrian and Lebanese authorities since the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime reported that Arab authorities have intercepted at least 177 million captagon tablets since late 2024.
Officials from Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon met in Amman this week to coordinate strategies against synthetic drug production and trafficking. Under former president Bashar Assad, Syria had become a hub for captagon production, with the government largely ignoring neighboring countries’ concerns.
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