Syria’s Captagon trade: inside a Damascus amphetamine factory
Burnt-out rooms reveal extent of lucrative regime-supported operation to smuggle drug across region
It was no secret, everyone seemed to know where it was. When asked for directions, the coffee vendor pointed up the hill. “The Captagon factory? Straight ahead.”
On the outskirts of Damascus, just a 20 minute drive away from the centre of the Syrian capital, lay a sprawling industrial complex. Professed to be a soap factory, its products were anything but clean.
Rebels had broken into the complex on Sunday as they pushed towards the capital city and found millions of Captagon pills and industrial quantities of precursor chemicals. They had found plastic fruits which, when broken open, would reveal hundreds of tiny pills, along with fake copper coils stuffed with the narcotic and plasterboard with sheets of Captagon stashed inside – no creativity was spared in hiding the lucrative drug.
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