Damascus – In a remote corner outside Damascus, a now abandoned potato chip factory has shone a light on one of the Bashar al-Assad ousted the many dark but open secrets of the regime.
A CBS News team gained access to the site and found a warehouse containing industrial-scale hydrochloric acid and acetic acid, which are precursor chemicals needed to Captainone of the most popular street drugs in the Middle East and beyond.
Ahmed Abu Yakin is with Syria Hayat Tahrir al-Shamor HTS, one of the main groups governing the country after Assad continued to flee December 8. Yakin says this vast underground cache of Captagon was found just days after the rebel group took over. The pills were put into large stacks of household voltage regulator kits, ready for shipping.
Captagon, often called ‘poor man’s cocaine’, is a highly addictive amphetamine-like stimulant.
“We feel bad for the young people who were addicted to it,” Yakin said. “The Assad regime destroyed a generation and they didn’t care. They were only concerned with making money.’
And that money is awesome. Analysts estimate that the Assad regime was extracting $5 billion a year from trade, dwarfing Syria’s official budget and providing a crucial lifeline for the bankrupt state. The drug costs only pennies to make, but can be sold for up to $20 for a single tablet. The loot in the abandoned factory is potentially worth tens of millions of dollars.
For years, neighboring countries accused Assad’s Syria of being the world’s main supplier of the illegal drug. In March 2023, the US Treasury Department sanctioned several Syrians for their alleged involvement in “dangerous amphetamines”, including two of Assad’s cousins.
“Syria has become a world leader in the production of the highly addictive Captagon, much of which is trafficked through Lebanon,” Andrea Gacki, then director of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, said at the time. “Together with our allies, we will hold accountable those who support the regime of Bashar al-Assad with illicit drug revenues and other financial resources that enable the regime’s continued oppression of the Syrian people.”
Now his hugely lucrative drug trade appears to have been crushed, along with his brutal and corrupt regime. Captagon has no place in Syria’s future for Yakin.
“We will destroy it all,” Yakin said. “We will eliminate everything related to drugs and everything related to the criminal Assad regime.”
