21 March 2023

The sharp increase in the scale of the captagon trade and the diversification of smuggling routes witnessed in recent years ought to draw attention to the potential impact of this traffic on the Mediterranean security landscape.

By Jeanne Albin Security analyst intern

The scale of the captagon trade has been rapidly rising in recent years. Produced in Syria and, to a lesser extent, the Beqaa valley of Lebanon, it is overwhelmingly destined for markets in the Gulf countries, primarily Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The amphetamine-type stimulant has recently been at the heart of significant media investigations and political debates following its reported link with, amongst others, the Syrian government and Hezbollah.

There is a plethora of evidence highlighting the importance of overland routes—in particular, through Jordan and, increasingly, Iraq—to the smuggling of captagon. The Mediterranean Sea appears, however, to have been the main facilitator of the trade’s growth these past few years. Indeed, alongside the fact that instability caused by the Syrian civil war has disrupted established land-based smuggling operations, maritime routes present the advantage of allowing the transport of larger volumes of drugs. These also avoid risky border crossings while benefiting from the immense flow of goods central to the global supply chain and the resulting lack of systematic container checks at ports. One of the most widely reported smuggling methods sees captagon being transported from the Mediterranean ports of Beirut, Tartous, and Latakia to the Persian Gulf through the Red and Arabian Seas, often through the use of containerised maritime shipments.

Furthermore, the captagon trade is, like most big-scale drug trafficking enterprises, characterised by an evolving level of sophistication. Smugglers have progressively favoured concealing captagon in licit industrial and agricultural cargo. But the evidence now suggests that the vigilance of Gulf customs officials towards shipments from the Levant has led to the emergence of new patterns of smuggling characterised by the implementation of ‘re-routing’ strategies. These consist in making use of transit ports in Southern Europe (such as Greece or Italy) and North Africa (such as Libya and Egypt) to conceal shipments’ origins, sometimes in collaboration with local criminal networks.

Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that the currently available evidence does not suggest a significant impact of captagon smuggling on licit commercial shipping enterprises, with vessels rarely being reported as suffering consequences related to the ongoing smuggling activity other than possible investigation-related delays linked with the use of regular commercial traffic to smuggle the drug. However, captagon smuggling’s threat to trade itself is very real, as perhaps best illustrated by the ban on Lebanese fruit and vegetable imports temporarily implemented by Saudi Arabia in mid-2021 following the repeated discoveries of millions of pills in shipments from the port of Beirut. Perhaps more importantly, the diversification of methods and routes, as well as the increasing interaction and engagement between traffickers and organised criminal groups in transit countries, highlights that the smuggling is gradually expanding into a Mediterranean zone challenge. 

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