This report from the UK's Daily Mail, published on 9 December 2024.

Under murderous dictator Bashar al-Assad, Syrians faced massive crackdowns for alleged drug use for years, often being handed long sentences in prisons where they would be subjected to horrific torture. 

But for years, the hypocritical tyrant's regime secretly netted three times more money than all of Mexico's cartels, by one estimate, with a small white pill that everyone from ISIS terrorists to construction workers chased after. 

Captagon, known locally as the 'drug of jihad', and 'poor man's cocaine', was originally sold as a cure for attention deficit disorders, narcolepsy and depression when it was first developed by a German pharmaceutical firm in 1961. In 1986, Captagon was banned in almost all countries after it was listed as a Schedule II drug by the UN.

But junkies found the drug was a cheap and quick way to get massive bursts of energy and productivity, alertness and sometimes a sense of euphoria. As a result, it became the drug of choice for everyone from high-end revellers to construction site workers, and even terrorist rampagers. 

Israeli media reported that Hamas' fighters pumped themselves full of the drug right before they carried out their deadly October 7 massacre, in which they killed around 1,200 people and kidnapped a total of 251. 

ISIS fighters were also known for their use of the drug, with experts telling CNN in 2015 that it made people feel impervious to bullets. 

'You can stay awake for days at a time. You don't have to sleep,' Dr. Robert Keisling, a psychiatrist at MedStar Washington Hospital Center, told the outlet.

'It gives you a sense of well-being and euphoria. And you think that you're invincible and that nothing can harm you.' 

Syria is responsible for around 80% of the world's production of Captagon, and for years Bashar al-Assad, who has now been deposed thanks to a lighting offensive led by an Islamist rebel group, was a key player in the industry. 

In 2021 alone, $5.7 billion of the pills were sold. 

Experts estimate that Assad's illict trade of Captagon was worth 'approximately 3 times the combined trade of the Mexican cartels.'

An investigation by the New York Times in 2021 revealed that much of the country's production and distribution of the drug was supervised by the Fourth Armoured Division of the Syrian Army, an elite unit commanded by Maher Assad, Bashar's younger brother.  

Intelligence sources based in the region say Captagon is still produced in small factories along the Syrian-Lebanese border as well as larger ones closer to Syria's frontier with Jordan. 

Some quantities are also produced in Lebanon, with the help of Hezbollah, according to security sources. 

Despite its lucrativeness, Assad began stepping away incrementally from the trade in the years before his regime fell in a bid to build up his fractured relationships with other Arab states. 

Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have long seen Captagon as a scourge on their nations, and spent considerable resources cracking down on smuggling operations. 

In February 2022, Jordan's army said it killed 30 smugglers in just two months, and foiled attempts to smuggle 16million Captagon pills from Syria, an amount that was far beyond the entire volume seized in 2021. 

Months later, in August 2022, Saudi Arabia said they had uncovered 46million pills that were smuggled in a shipment of flour. 

And in February 2023, a man was arrested in Abu Dhabi, in the UAE, for trying to get 4.5million Captagon pills in cans of green beens.  

Last May, Assad reportedly gave Jordan consent to kill a well-known Captagon dealer, Merhi al-Ramthan, in southern Syria with an airstrike, and allowed a Captagon factory near the Jordanian border to be destroyed. 

The strikes came just a day before Syria was formally readmitted to the Arab League, which it was kicked out of in 2011 over Assad's brutal crackdown on protesters in the leadup to the Syrian Civil War. 

'Assad gave assurances that he would stop the regime from supporting and protecting smuggling networks,' a former brigadier general of Jordan's intelligence service, Saud Al-Sharafat, told The Associated Press. 'For example, he facilitated the disposal of al-Ramthan.' 

Al-Ramthan was considered 'the most prominent drug trafficker in the region, and the number one smuggler of drugs, including Captagon, into Jordan', the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said. 

But for all the money Assad was netting, he simply couldn't stop power from slipping out of his hands. 

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