Syria's new government has successfully dismantled large-scale production of the synthetic drug captagon after the fall of the Bashar Assad regime a year ago, according to an analysis by the U.N.
Since December 2024, authorities have shut down 15 industrial-scale laboratories and 13 smaller storage facilities, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said in a report released Monday.
Powerful stimulants sold under the name captagon, however, continue to dominate the drug market in the Middle East, U.N. experts said. Large seizures across the region indicate that significant stockpiles of the pills originating from Syria remain in circulation.
The Vienna-based UNODC also believes that smaller-scale production is continuing inside Syria and in neighboring countries.
The agency warned that consumers in the region could shift to methamphetamine following the disruption of Syria’s captagon industry. The methamphetamine market in the Middle East has expanded rapidly in recent years, according to U.N. officials.
The captagon trade was a major source of income for the Syrian state under long-time dictator Assad.
For more than a decade, most captagon was produced in Syria, with precursor chemicals imported on a large scale through state-controlled trade entities, the UNODC report said.
Captagon was originally the brand name of a now-discontinued pharmaceutical that contained the stimulant fenethylline.
Today’s captagon tablets typically contain amphetamine, sometimes combined with other substances such as theophylline.
