ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
As Syria's economy collapsed during the long civil war, the country became something of a narcostate. The regime of ousted President Bashar al-Assad was estimated to earn billions of dollars annually from trafficking a drug known as Captagon. NPR's Greg Myre is here to explain. Hi, Greg.
GREG MYRE, BYLINE: Hey, Ari.
SHAPIRO: What is Captagon?
MYRE: Well, Captagon was created as a legal pharmaceutical drug in Germany in the 1960s. It gives users a rush of energy. It can make them very productive in the short term. However, it's very addictive. It can cause hallucinations and heart problems, so it was outlawed.
But it gained a second life as an illegal party drug popular, among other places, in the Middle East. So when Syria's civil war erupted in 2011, the already weak economy imploded. President Bashar al-Assad was desperate for money, and the country decided to make itself a hub of the Captagon trade. Caroline Rose at the New Lines Institute in Washington, has studied this drug-trafficking for years.
CAROLINE ROSE: Really, around 2018, 2019, when the regime started to recognize that this was a lucrative illicit trade, we saw this large-scale investment into industrial-scale production facilities, warehouses, trafficking networks.
SHAPIRO: Greg, tell us more about those networks. How did the regime get the drug from Syria into people's hands?
MYRE: Yeah, a key figure was Assad's brother, Maher al-Assad. Now, he's best known as the regime's brutal enforcer, but according to Rose, Maher also ran the Captagon business by working very closely with Syria's military and security services. And now that the Assads are ousted, we're learning more about the operations, including a production facility recently raided near Damascus.
ROSE: It was a factory for potato chips called Captain Corn. And after its factory owner left Syria in 2018, Maher personally authorized that factory to be used for Captagon production. It was Maher that really operated and coordinated and created this very smooth structure.
MYRE: So the drug was distributed throughout the region. The leading markets were wealthy gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. And these were ideal markets - rich countries, lots of young people, alcohol is banned, and they have very harsh penalties for hard drugs. Captagon had a bit less social stigma and was just very popular.
SHAPIRO: How did neighboring countries respond to all this?
MYRE: Well, of course, they wanted to stop this drug trafficking. However, many isolated Assad and really didn't have a lot of influence over him. In the past couple years, several Arab states moved to reestablish at least some links with Assad. And partly because it looked like Assad had survived the civil war - the fighting had tapered off, it seemed they had no real choice but to deal with him. So Syria had, in effect, created a problem. It could use its leverage to end its isolation. David McCloskey, a former CIA official who worked on Syria, described how the Syrian regime seemed to view its drug operations.
DAVID MCCLOSKEY: Let's earn money by selling something that's lucrative to our regime. And then let's create a problem for the Saudis, the Jordanians, the Gulfies so that they have to come to us if they want this turned off, 'cause it seems like some of the logic and reengaging him was reducing this drug trade.
SHAPIRO: So now that Assad is an exile and the regime has fallen, does that mean the end of the Captagon trade in Syria?
MYRE: So the faction that now controls Damascus, HTS, says it does intend to stop this drug dealing. But, of course, that'll depend on how much control a new government is able to establish. Caroline Rose thinks bigger operations run by the Assad regime are likely to get shut down. However, smaller underground labs could survive or crop up elsewhere.
SHAPIRO: NPR's Greg Myre. Thank you.
MYRE: Sure thing, Ari.
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