The Middle East's Drug Trade is Worse Than You Think

If I asked you to think about the global drug trade, your minds would probably go to South America. And you would most likely picture flamboyant drug lords like El Chapo, who managed to escape from Mexican maximum security prisons twice.

Maybe also Pablo Escobar and his cocaine hippos that have wreaked havoc on Colombia, or maybe Carlos Leda, who, in a move whose sheer audacity will never be matched, bought an island in the Bahamas.

Given enough time, you might move on to Europe, where the drug lords are a lot less flashy, but every bit as capable as their South American compatriots. Or you might think of Africa, which was described as the next frontline in the global drug trade by the outlet Geopolitical Monitor.

Odds are, though, that you won't think of the Middle East, and with good reason.

Whenever the region is in the news, it's usually because of one of the many conflicts tearing through it, be it Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza, or Hezbollah in Lebanon, or Washington and Jerusalem's war with Iran. The region is rarely, if ever, in the news because of the drug trade.

And that's a major problem, because as the world has turned a blind eye, the Middle East's drug trade has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry that threatens to destabilize an already fragile region.

The Trade To illustrate just how big the Middle East's drug trade is, we need to talk about Captagon, a drug which is sometimes called the poor man's cocaine.

First developed in Germany in 1961, but it was sold across Europe and the Middle East to people with attention deficit disorder or narcolepsy, and was also briefly approved for use in the United States. However, concerns about abuse and side effects, such as hallucinations and increased aggression, piled up through the 70s and early 80s.

In 1986, most countries discontinued its use after it was added to schedule two of the UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances. That should have been the end of it, but given that we are giving it a lot of airtime, you can imagine where this is going next.

Following the ban, remaining stockpiles were smuggled from Eastern Europe to markets in the Middle East.

By the 1990s, counterfeit Captagon tablets were being manufactured in South Eastern Europe, with criminal networks in the Balkans and Turkey smuggling the drug to the Arabian Peninsula. The pills flooding the region barely resembled the original pharmaceutical product.

Modern Captagon tablets contain little to no phenethylene, the drug's original active ingredients.

They are instead cocktails of amphetamine, caffeine, and sometimes even Viagra or heroin. These additives are included to make production cheaper and to increase the addictive potential of what is already a pretty addictive drug.

By the mid-2000s, the production sites had shifted again, this time to the Hezbollah-controlled Beqar Valley in Eastern Lebanon, which was already a long-established hub for cannabis and opium.

Production sites would shift one final time in 2013, this time to Syria after Hezbollah entered the Syrian civil war on the side of Bashar al-Assad. What followed was one of the most brazen narco-state arrangements in recent memory.

As Hezbollah's production networks embedded themselves into Syrian territory, the Assad regime took the opportunity to muscle into the industry, using its military infrastructure to manage both manufacturing and trafficking routes.

By 2018, Assad's brother, Maher al-Assad, the head of the notoriously violent 4th Armour Division, was personally authorizing the conversion of a former CRISP factory into a captagon production facility after its owner fled.

According to the US Treasury Department, Maher's cousin, Samar Kamal al-Assad, oversaw production facilities in regime-controlled Latakia. In 2020, 84 million captagon pills produced at a factory Samar owned were seized at the Italian port of Solano.

The authorities estimated they were worth $1.2 billion. These numbers indicate just how big the captagon market is. If one factory can produce at least $1.2 billion worth of pills, which we have to emphasize was a single shipment sent to a single port in Italy, then we might be looking at a trade worth as much as $57 billion with a B.

As the government noted in the UK, this is approximately three times the combined trade of the Mexican cartels. Now while captagon is, and we'll use a technical term here, a big f***ing deal, it isn't the only drug being trafficked across the Middle East.

Cannabis is also extremely popular in the region, and the two countries most responsible for supplying it are Lebanon and Morocco.

Lebanon's Bakal Valley has become a major cannabis producer since at least the 1960s, supplying product to the Gulf markets and to Europe.

In Morocco, cannabis cultivation is concentrated in the Northeast Rift area, where, according to the European Union Institute for Security Studies, more than 470 square kilometers, about the same size as Prague, are dedicated to the crop. Then there's cart, a leafy stimulant that has been chewed in the Arabian Peninsula for centuries.

It is legal in Yemen, where it is deeply woven into daily life. In 2017, Yemen's Ministry of Agriculture estimated that the many people spend about $12 billion a year on carts. That figure might not seem like much, given that Americans spend more than $220 billion on alcohol in 2024.

However, we should point out that according to the World Bank, Yemen's GDP in 2017 was $26.84 billion, which means the Yemenis were spending nearly half of their GDP on one drug. While cart is illegal in most other Middle Eastern countries, that has not stopped it from moving across borders in serious quantities.

In 2025, Saudi authorities intercepted a major smuggling operation close to its border with Yemen, seizing more than 829 kilograms of cart.

Despite such dramatic arrests, cart continues to be one of the most popular drugs in Saudi Arabia, particularly in the Jazan region, which is close to the border with Yemen. In one study published in the PLOS 1 journal, nearly 70% of participants said that they'd had an easy time obtaining the drug despite it being illegal.

Finally, we have to talk about the region's most famous drug of all, opium, an extremely addictive narcotic extracted from the poppy plant.

Phine is refined, chemically processed, and chemical processed to produce heroin, a Solo We'll be right back. synthetic opioid that enters the brain much faster and produces a more immediate high.

In the past, Lebanon's Bakar Valley was a major opium producer, with cultivation reaching around 30 metric tons annually in 1983, though production has since dropped to negligible levels. That production shifted east to Afghanistan, which pretty quickly became the center of the global opium trade.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, in 2007 Afghanistan produced 8,200 tons of opium. Soon, Kabul was producing more than 90% of the world's heroin supply and more than 95% of Europe's supply.

To give you an idea of how important this industry was to the Afghan economy, according to UNODC, in 2008 heroin accounted for just over half of Afghanistan's GDP, about $2.7 billion out of $5.2 billion.

By 2021, while its contribution to the GDP had dropped significantly, from over 50% to around 14%, it was still higher than the value of the country's legal exports. Afghanistan sits at the heart of what has become known as the Golden Crescent, a region comprising it, Iran, and Pakistan, that is a global hub for the production and distribution of opiates.

Once heroin is produced in the Crescent, there are three primary options to traffic it.

First is the Balkan route, which operates through Iran and Turkey and is responsible for getting heroin to Europe. Then there are the Northern routes, through which heroin reaches Russia and Central Asia. And finally, there's the Southern route, which emerged because of increased law enforcement action on the Northern and Balkan routes.

The Southern route traffics heroin into Pakistan and Iran, and from there to the rest of the world by air and sea. Now we chose to highlight these routes to showcase just how complex the distribution channels for these drugs really are. The fact that they exist, and that the Middle East is one of the world's leading drug hubs, raises another question.

How did we get here? The main reason why the Middle East finds itself in the middle of a drug crisis is simple. Drugs are really, really profitable.

In the previous chapter, we already mentioned how much opiates were contributing to the Afghan economy, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. Let's start with the most basic level, the farmer. According to the UNODC, in 2023, the average Afghan farmer could expect to make around $10,000 per hectare growing poppies.

If they grew wheat, they could only make $770. Cannabis growers in Lebanon's Bakar Valley can make $30,000 to $50,000 per year with several large fields. In a region with limited employment alternatives and crumbling infrastructure, that makes it one of the most reliable sources of income.

And I mean, $50,000 a year is a pretty respectable wage here in the Czech Republic, let alone a poor region of Lebanon. Most of these bombers are not evil people. They are mostly just regular folk who want to make the most of their lives in one of the most unstable regions on the planet.

They've got bills to pay and families to take care of, and are simply choosing the option that gives them the best possible chance of doing this. And this is replicated at the government level.

There are states across the Middle East that are choosing to turn a blind eye to the drug trade because of how much revenue it generates, especially in poor rural communities.

Governments that do this are not explicitly endorsing the drug trade, but they have accepted the economic reality that completely dismantling it would remove one of a few sources of income in poor areas. So they are content with making occasional shows of force to keep everyone in line, and not much else.

Then you have cases like Syria under Bashar al-Assad, where the state went from turning a blind eye to the drug trade to being an active player, and within a few short years, the biggest player on the scene.

Assad Syria did this because the drug trade provided the state with much-needed revenue as it was fighting a civil war and dealing with crippling international sanctions. According to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, the cab-de-gon trade was worth more than $5.7 billion per year to Damascus.

Why not all that money made it back to Syria?

The amount that did appears to have been sufficient to keep the regime involved in the trade until its final days. But Assad didn't just use cab-de-gon as a revenue source, he also weaponized it.

Joel Rayburn, the former U.S. special envoy to Syria, told the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, and we'll quote him here, "...the Assad regime is waging a drug war against its regional neighbors." The regime flooded the borders of Jordan and Saudi Arabia with the drug, using it as leverage in diplomatic negotiations and as a tool of

Destabilization.

In the spring and summer of 2023, cab-de-gon became a key agenda item in normalization negotiations between the Assad regime and its regional counterparts. The regime used the threat of continuing the drug flow to resist demands related to human rights abuses and Syria's relationship with Iran. This strategy seemed to work for a time.

In 2023, Syria was readmitted to the Arab League, and Assad was given a warm welcome when he arrived in Jena for his first Arab League meeting in more than a decade. Syria's neighbors hoped that by embracing Assad, the flow of drugs into their borders would stop. But it didn't.

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems pretty obvious why. If the drug stopped flowing, Assad would have lost a critical source of revenue that couldn't be easily replaced without sanctions relief. His own family were also benefiting massively from the drug trade.

And perhaps most importantly, he would have lost a source of significant political leverage. It's possible that Assad was gambling on being able to extract more concessions from other countries by keeping the flow of drugs going a little while longer. This didn't happen.

Instead, the continued flow of drugs caused the security situation to deteriorate, particularly along the border between Syria and Jordan. By 2022, a year before Syria was readmitted to the Arab League, there were so many clashes between Syrian drug smugglers and the Jordanian army that, according to Gitok, it resembled a de facto drug war.

And that might be the most apt description, given that the Jordanian government had instituted a shoot-to-kill order that resulted in the deaths of 27 Syrian traffickers.

By 2024, Jordan was conducting airstrikes into Syria, targeting drug smugglers. And no matter how devastating those strikes, and subsequent ones, have been, the drugs haven't stopped pouring into Jordan. a flood that not even the dramatic change in Syria's government seems to have impacted.

And they won't stop as long as demand for drugs is high, and in the Gulf states, demand is really high.

Saudi Arabia alone accounts for approximately 50% of global captagon consumption. Jordan has shifted from being just a transit hub to one of the leading consumers of the drug, with authorities estimating that as much as 20% of the drug transiting through the country is consumed locally.

Most of the people who use these drugs in wealthy Arab nations are recreational users chasing a high.

But they're not the only ones driving up demand. The constant fighting in the region has led to a seemingly never-ending cycle of trauma which is often associated with increased drug use. Couple this with the collapse of healthcare systems, and you have the perfect recipe to create long-term drug dependencies among very vulnerable populations.

The constant fighting has also created one of the most severe refugee crises in recent history, with millions of people displaced. According to the Brookings Institution, some of these refugees, miserable, segregated, and without many opportunities for employment, will find jobs in the drug sector, making the crisis even more complex.

So, given the magnitude of the issue, we have to ask, can the Middle East win its version of the war on drugs?

Winning the war on drugs Now, regular viewers of Front Stocko will remember that we put out a video a while back asking if Latin America could win the war on drugs. And in the opening of that video, I said, we fought the drugs, and the drugs won.

And we stand by that assessment, because it is the view of most leading experts in the field, including the Global Commission on Drug Policy, which released a report all the way back in 2011, saying that the global war on drugs had failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world.

But standing by that assessment doesn't mean we are asking Middle Eastern governments to allow drug smuggling cartels to run roughshod over them. Rather, we are saying that governments need to combine enforcement with pragmatic policies that address the root causes driving people to drugs in the first place.

On the enforcement side, Middle Eastern governments will continue disrupting smuggling networks and production facilities.

Jordan's airstrikes into Syria may not have stopped the flow of drugs, but they have raised the costs for traffickers rather than just giving them free reign. Saudi authorities have also been aggressive in intercepting drug shim and seizing hundreds of kilograms of cart and thousands of pills in multiple operations.

But enforcement alone will not solve this crisis, particularly when the economic incentives, especially for farmers, remain so lopsided.

Governments need to invest in alternative development programs that give farmers viable options beyond drug crops. In Afghanistan, the United Nations Development Programme has established more than a thousand commercial and micro-greenhouses, over a hundred irrigation projects, and dozens of post-harvest handling facilities.

These are meant to make it easier for farmers to transition to high-volume crops like saffron, which can sell for up to $1,500 per kilo in Western markets, as well as nuts and fruits.

And while those are great initiatives, especially after the Taliban instituted a ban on poppy cultivation, farmers still say they lack support to grow alternative crops. Because of this, they have to choose between punishment and poverty. One farmer told the BBC, "If we violate the ban, we face prison.

If we comply, we face destitution. If there is no money, then I'll grow poppies again." The Taliban, and this feels really odd to say, will need to do more than just ban poppy production.

It needs to give people a viable alternative on the demand side governments need to treat addiction as a public health issue rather than a criminal one in 2020 saudi arabia licensed private rehabilitation centers making a shift from punitive measures to treatment focused solutions this approach while still in its early stages recognizes that jailing addicts

Does not reduce consumption it just pushes the problem underground and makes it harder for people to seek help governments also need to invest in education and prevention programs particularly for young people the demographic boom across the middle east means that millions of young adults will be entering the job market at a time of increased uncertainty

According to the world bank 25 of the region's youth are unemployed the highest rate of youth unemployment in the world given that ai is disrupting job markets and this war with iran has caused billions of dollars in economic damage the future looks bleak for young people governments also need to address the refugee crisis providing refugees with pathways to

Meaningful employment to help reduce the numbers that fall into the hands of drug smuggling gangs now there's no guarantee that any of this will work especially as smugglers have proven very capable of adapting and demand for drugs will always exist in one form or another still we should all hope that this works because if it doesn't the middle east risks

Becoming the next narco region where the people smuggling the drugs have enough power to rival the government and that would be a terrifying outcome thank you for watching