Captagon, Take Me Away

There's a new (read: old) drug threat allegedly turning already-seething Middle Eastern men into Hulking supersoldiers, used by both ISIS and Hamas in their recent brutal attack on Israeli music festival-goers.  It's called fenethylline, brand name Captagon, media name "Jihadi Nightmare Drug." This amphetamine-type stimulant has got Western journalists' panties in a major twist.  Let's try to deconstruct this terrorist-fueling murder pill in the most dry & boring way possible, shall we?   


Fenethylline Farmacology

Captagon--a member of the cathinone family along with khat & mephedrone, was commercially produced and sold until the 1980s, when it was banned due to fears of its 'highly addictive nature'.  Prior to this it was prescribed as a MILDER amphetamine alternative for kids with ADHD, then called "hyperkinetic disorder of childhood", as well as narcolepsy & depression--the exact same conditions Adderall and other amphetamines are prescribed for today.  Captagon has the benefit of not increasing blood pressure/heart rate as much as the amphetamines, yet for some inexplicable reason it was chucked into Schedule I in 1981 despite low rates of abuse.  Today Syria produces the bulk of the Earth's supply at around 80%. 

Well these look legit. 🙄  "Captagon" pills sold on the black market.

Exotic = Dangerous?

Opioid Rx limits for cancer patients in S. America

Different stimulants (and drugs in general) are legal & prescribed in different countries.  In the stimulant department, the U.S. has Adderall, Ritalin & Benzedrex while Mexico has clobenzorex (no relation to Benzedrex), Mazindol & fenproporex.  The U.S. historically had very liberal opioid prescribing practices and kratom is currently available OTC in most states with NO federal age requirements to purchase, but in Argentina it's banned entirely & opioids can only be prescribed for 10 days consecutively... even in cancer patients.  In the UK it's customary for patients getting endoscopies and colonoscopies to do so without sedation--a practice that makes most Americans shudder.  Who's right and who's wrong, and who decides? 

And just look what drugs we've chosen to fully legalize:  alcohol & tobacco, two of the most carcinogenic, chronically damaging substances in existence.  Alcohol's one of only a handful of substances that can cause fatal withdrawals & the ONLY recreational substance that causes mental retardation and a whole "syndrome" (FASD) in fetuses.  It's a Group 1 Carcinogen that causes around 13 types of cancer as well as a unique form of dementia and of course, liver damage that can be fatal.

Tobacco was known as far back as 1987 to be as hard to quit as heroin, amphetamine & cocaine.  That's to say nothing of its toxicity to the cardiovascular system, lungs & its potential emerging role in causing schizophrenia.  It also causes a number of deadly cancers including cancer of the mouth, throat, esophagus, lung, pancreas, colon, bladder & cervix among others.  And that's not even touching on all of our Rx drugs that have been recalled or withdrawn from the market over the years:  fenfluramine (the "fen" in Fen-Phen); Vioxx, Darvocet, phenylpropanolamine, Zelnorm & many, many more. 

Alcohol & tobacco are Group 1 Carcinogens: the most dangerous kind.

Today amphetamine, methamphetamine (brand name: Desoxyn), phenmetrazine, benzphetamine, cocaine & methylphenidate are Schedule II Controlled Substances in the U.S:  tightly controlled but deemed to have legit medical uses. Compare these to Cannabis, MDMA, psilocybin mushrooms & peyote--all Schedule I federally and deemed to have zero medical use and dangerous addictive or toxic potential.  So keep that in mind when judging the drugs other countries decide to keep legal, k?  

But back to Captagon:  Today, many counterfeit drugs and drug combos are sold as this highly sought-after pill, including amphetamine + caffeine or, less often, meth + ephedrine.  This can result in unpredictable effects since these drugs are obviously not Captagon and drug combos are risky in & of themselves.  When asked to describe Captagon's effects, one soldier described it thusly:

"You feel physically fit.  And if there were 10 people in front of you, you could catch them and kill them." 

Yikes.  But wait.  Amphetamine-type stimulants have been used in warfare going back to WWII when Japanese kamikazes took large doses of IV meth before suicide missions to give them that extra "oomph," and Hitler's Western Front soldiers received over 35 million methamphetamine pills (brand name: Pervitin) from April to July 1940.  The Fuhrer himself was known to start the day with a hefty injection of meth plus oxycodone and other various and sundry drugs/supplements, as did JFK.

Benzedrine tablets sample (copyright Museum of Health Care)

And can't forget the Americans, who were sucking on Benzedrine inhalers around this time and popping "pep pills" aplenty.  Benzedrine sulfate tablets were issued by military doctors to soldiers, military pilots and any civilian housewife with a headache who wanted to lose a few stubborn pounds.  Indeed, America in the 1940s and '50s had a prescription speed problem on par with the Rx opioid problem of the late '90s/early 2000s. There were even injectable methedrine (methamphetamine) vials of liquid that could be purchased OTC!  Of course the pendulum swung the other way and it was all banned, creating the crystal meth market we have today.  Because of course it was.  But for a while these drugs were considered miraculous and harmless.

 

OTC Benzedrine inhalers containing amphetamine-soaked cotton rods

Illicit Captagon is now Syria's #1 export, far exceeding all legal exports with hundreds of millions of pills being seized at ports in Saudi Arabia, Greece, Italy & others.  High-quality Captagon pills sell for up to $14 while low-quality ones go for about a buck--quite the difference.  Captagon has been seized as far West as France & Germany and as far East as Malaysia.    

What It All Means

I guess the big question is:  so fucking what?  How is this drug any different than the hundreds of other black market drugs that've come and gone throughout the years, rising and falling in popularity due to supply & demand and the changing trends?  If it's less likely to cause cardiovascular damage than regular amphetamine, doesn't that make it LESS dangerous to the user overall? 

Once again, the only real problem is its prohibition and the fact that criminals with evil intentions control the profits and supply.  If governments hadn't put it in Schedule I in the '80s, Syrian warlords wouldn't be getting rich from it now and tainting the supply with meth, ephedrine and god knows what else.  And it likely wouldn't be as available to already-angry ISIS/Hamas soldiers looking for an excuse to get fucked up and rape/pillage.

All the effort & money wasted by Western intelligence tracking this stupid cause is just that--a waste.  There would BE no black market in which drugs funded terrorism if they were legalized & regulated by said governments.  But these 3-letter agencies have to justify their existence somehow, so we keep doing it the stupid way year after year, decade after decade while people suffer and die needlessly.  Fine, just don't expect us to swallow your endless flood of yellow journalism & fear-mongering about the latest demon drug or its Satanic peddlers.  We're sick to death of hearing it--aren't you tired of reporting it, merely swapping out the names of drugs while keeping the headlines & bodies of the story the same? 

Let me help you out:  Drugs exist in every corner of the globe, some you've never heard of, but they mostly belong to one of a handful of categories:  stimulant/empathogen, depressant, hallucinogen/dissociative, opioid, deliriant or cannabinoid.  People take them for a variety of reasons but when they abuse them it's usually to escape environmental problems or situations in which they feel helpless and hopeless:  poverty, stress at work/home/community, traumatic memories, untreated mental illness or physical pain/illness.  If you live in a war torn region like the Middle East, it's not hard to see why one might wanna alter or escape that reality unless you're just being intentionally dense.  With stimulants like Captagon or Adderall in the States, people often take them as performance-enhancers or to work longer hours (yay capitalism!)  Not exactly shocking that soldiers would use them on the battlefields to increase alertness & precision.  Our soldiers did for a long, long time & it wasn't a scandal.

I was just searchin' for an image of Rx Captagon, Google.  Control yourself.