Captagon

Captagon is the brand name under which fenethylline, a codrug of amphetamine and theophylline, was once marketed as a psychostimulant, and the name is now used generically to describe illicitly produced and sold fenethylline. In 2023 the United Kingdom foreign ministry estimated that Syria was responsible for about 80 percent of global Captagon production, exported through the port of Latakia with the involvement of the Syrian government under Maher al-Assad, and the same report cited independent estimates that the trade could be worth up to 57 billion dollars, a figure a Syria analyst and colleagues at Century International challenged as roughly ten times the country's annual budget; a 2021 report by the New Lines Institute, based on the retail value of seized shipments, put the market at at least 5.7 billion dollars. Smuggling of fenethylline became Syria's principal export during the 2011 to 2024 civil war, exceeding the combined total of all other exports under the Assad government, and a large quantity of tablets ready for clandestine export was captured by anti-Assad forces when they took control of Damascus in December 2024.