Fenethylline

This all comes after years of drug smuggling across that same border.

Under the Assad regime, smugglers sent drones and mules into Jordan carrying Captagon, not the animal, the idiot people.

That trafficking is trailed off of late, but these recent flare-ups are on my radar.

We don't need more flashpoints in the current war.

And through it all, Assad found a new revenue stream to keep his broke, sanctioned, war-shattered state afloat.

Captagon.

Regime-linked security agencies, including units run by Assad's own relatives, turned Syria into the world's largest producer of amphetamine, generating an estimated $2-4 billion a year, dwarfing the country's actual state budget.

Assad ran a full-blown narco state, and somehow still held onto power for another 13 years after Daraa.

But this was not something that we were expecting tensions between Jordan and Syria at this moment.

There have been longstanding tensions relating to the smuggling of Captagon, this very addictive drug that Iran backed militias were selling into Jordan.

And also, by the way, sending weapons into Jordan, uh, as a means to try to radicalize the population or to have those weapons moved onward to the West Bank to continue to stoke unrest there.

But one gets a sense that this escalated rather quickly.

But this was not something that we were expecting tensions between Jordan and Syria at this moment.

There have been longstanding tensions relating to the smuggling of Captagon, this very addictive drug that Iran backed militias were selling into Jordan.

And also, by the way, sending weapons into Jordan, uh, as a means to try to radicalize the population or to have those weapons moved onward to the West Bank to continue to stoke unrest there.

But one gets a sense that this escalated rather quickly.

So 2015, I'm the DEA office head in Istanbul, Turkey.

This reporter, through a circuitous route, gets to DEA headquarters, Congressional Public Affairs, requests authority to speak with me and interviewed me about Captagon, which is an MFET.

And it was weird.

It has a weird history of being common in Eastern Europe and on the Arabian Peninsula.

but nothing at the scale that it eventually would grow to.

So this reporter and I are talking, and the reporter asked me, you know, point blank, like, how is it that we went from 2012, where there were, you know, maybe tons of Captagon seized all over the world, to 2015, where we're seeing ton after ton seizure of Captagon across the four major countries of the Levant? So I give her this textbook answer.

superficial analysis of somebody who's looking at heroin organizations, looking at heroin organizations branching into cocaine, looking at old school Kurdish groups, working with Baloch groups in Afghanistan to ship it off to the West and deliver it to London and deliver it to Amsterdam and the trying true old Silk Road that turned into the Balkan route.

I give her this answer of, hey, it was just the chaos of the Syrian civil war.

And we were told, basically we were threatened, and we were told that it wouldn't be safe for us to come to the country, so we boarded a mission.

And then there was a second story we wanted to do about Captagon, which is sort of a meth type drug that is used and trafficked heavily in the Middle East.

And some people say that some of like Hamas and Hezbollah had used Captagon.

So we wanted to do that story.

But then our producer was already on the ground and he was taken by police.

The first consists of direct financial transfers from Tehran.

The second involves narcotics, trafficking and the Captagon trade, which Farrar attributed to Hezbollah's operations in Lebanon and across a number of Latin American countries.

The third draws on donors and backers of the Shia faith spread across various countries.

Prosecutors allege the fourth component is a web of shell companies used to bring in income, obscure money trails, and conceal the origin and destination of funds.

Yeah

... monstrosities are these people?" Um, I, I know they want to cop the Captagon, but you still have to start with a, a moral compass for crying out loud.

You know, that was one part of my research that I did.

My film is not about October 7th, but, you know, in doing the research I did, I did watch a lot of the, uh, footage, the, the body cam footage from October 7, from, you know, Hamas' perspective.

Yeah.

I mean, I mean, it's disgusting, right? But, and, and nobody wants to look at it.

Um, I, I understand that, but I think when you understand the barbarity of what happened that day, that, uh, you would, uh, want to keep those memories fresh or you wanna know man's inhumanity to man, Captagon notwithstanding.

So, uh, the, the film is called Operation Arnon: Inside Israel's Daring Hostage Rescue in Gaza.

But, you know, he, what he's saying is that, yeah, the whole economy is run on, I always forget the name of the fucking drug.

What's it called again, Alessi? Captagon? It's run on that Captagon drug.

Oh, you haven't heard about this?

Mm-mm.

So Captagon is, like, this meth, like, club drug or something, and Assad transferred basically the Syrian economy into a Captagon trafficking economy-

Wow

... that pushes it, you know, all over Europe and stuff like that, where it's used.

And Joby, when he was at the border of Syria, like last fall, they were, [laughs] they were watching all the trucks come across-