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Lebanon
Abu Hassan puts down his Kalashnikov and reaches into a pocket on his bodywarmer to hand me a small white pill. ‘Here,’ he says in Arabic, ‘a gift. This’ll keep you awake for 48 hours.’ He grins and adds in English: ‘Good sex!’ The pill is Captagon, an amphetamine known as ‘the poor man’s coke’. It can make the user feel invincible and was taken by fighters on all sides in Syria’s civil war; Isis were said to be big fans of ‘Captain Courage’. It has now spread across the Middle East. You might find Captagon fuelling a party in Riyadh or keeping a Baghdad taxi driver awake through a double shift. It is, of course, illegal. And horribly addictive. It is said to be by far Syria’s biggest export, providing more than 90 per cent of the country’s foreign currency. The Assad regime may be the world’s biggest narco state.
Abu Hassan was introduced to me as the boss of a Lebanese Captagon gang. We met through a relative of his – the only reason Abu Hassan is talking to me. He’s not the biggest Captagon producer in Lebanon, he says, but not the smallest either. He isn’t what you’d imagine a Lebanese drug lord might look like – no bling, no flash car. He is small and scruffy, in his fifties, with grey stubble and a weathered, chestnut-coloured face; he drives an ancient Mercedes. More in keeping with expectations, there are four or five bodyguards. One, wearing combat webbing stuffed with ammunition and grenades, sits with us while we talk. The mountains that are the border with Syria loom in the distance. Abu Hassan explains how the Assad regime makes money from him.
It starts with a call from a middleman in Syria, placing an order for a dealer in Iraq, Jordan or Saudi Arabia. Then they hurry to get the ingredients, what he calls ‘Chinese salts’ and benzene. These are legal chemicals shipped through the port of Beirut and they cost little. His men mix them up in a vat and stamp out the pills with a machine. Before it was banned, Captagon was a drug for narcolepsy and attention deficit disorder. The body breaks it down to amphetamine and another...
