The ‘poor man’s cocaine’ is now rife across the Middle East, heralding an era of violent, state-sponsored drug-trafficking, says Vanda Felbab-Brown
The World Today
Published 27 May 2022
Updated 17 May 2023 —3 minute READ
Image — Kurdish police in Qamishli, a city on the Syrian-Turkish border, find a stash of captagon tablets hidden in building materials
Dr Vanda Felbab-Brown
Director, Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors and Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution
Use of the drug captagon is increasing across the Middle East. The illicit production, smuggling and sale of this amphetamine-like narcotic are thought to be worth $5 billion a year, a large part of which props up Bashir al-Assad’s brutal regime in Syria and the militant group Hezbollah.
17 million captagon pills were seized by Jordanian authorities by April this year – more than in all of 2021
By April this year, Jordanian authorities reported that they had already seized 17 million pills of the ‘poor man’s cocaine’. This compares with the 15.5 million intercepted on its border with Syria in all of 2021. In the past two years large seizures have been made further afield as well. Authorities impounded a shipment of 85 million tablets in the Italian port of Salerno, 95 million tablets in Malaysia and 74kg of the drug in Nigeria.
But authorities in the Middle East and North Africa are unlikely to be able to counter the captagon traffickers.First, various militias involved in the smuggling enjoy powerful political patrons who help block law enforcement efforts.Second, police in the region frequently adopt old-fashioned and counterproductive anti-narcotics policies. Worse, these shortcomings have already allowed a wave of more damaging synthetic drugs to emerge.
Captagon was developed in the 1960s and marketed as a treatment for depression, brain injury and narcolepsy but, as it fell from medical use in the 1980s, the name came to be applied to an illicit mix of amphetamine and caffeine.In the 1990s, its illicit production was based in Bulgaria, but moved in the early 2000s to Lebanon. By the mid-2000s it had made its way into Syria.
Over the past decade, Lebanon and Syria have provided ideal circumstances for captagon production. Each is a weak state undermined by powerful militias and ethnic factions, with large refugee populations from the various Middle East wars.Both sit at the centre of large, historical smuggling networks from the Gulf to Europe.
In Syria, the trade in captagon has offered employment to chemists from Syria’s large chemical industry which, like much of the economy, has been devastated by the civil war. In addition, swaths of the country were taken over by jihadi groups such as ISIL, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which itself traded in captagon and whose fighters often used the drug.
As a New York Times investigation last year reported, the Fourth Armoured Division of the Syrian Army, commanded by Bashir al-Assad’s younger brother Maher, Syrian intelligence services, and traders and warlords linked to the Assad regime had become key sponsors of captagon production in Syria and trafficking across the Middle East.
Hezbollah increasingly relies on drug trafficking to pay their fighters, buy weapons and provide social handouts
It is not only the Syrian regime for which the captagon trade produces crucial survival money, however. US sanctions on Iran have reduced the historic flow of funding to Shia militant groups such as Hezbollah.Lebanese and Iraqi law enforcement officials have said that Hezbollah increasingly relies on drug trafficking, with the help of Syrian regime connections, to employ and pay their fighters, buy weapons and provide social handouts. Various pro-Iranian paramilitary groups in Iraq, such as the notorious Ketaib Hezbollah, are known to exploit drug trafficking for similar ends.
Tehran does not necessarily encourage drug trafficking by Iranian-backed militia groups but its support for such groups makes it difficult for police in Iraq and Lebanon to effectively prosecute them.
The involvement of these battled-hardened fighters in captagon and methamphetamine trafficking has meant the trade has become more violent. This contrasts with earlier generations of Lebanese smugglers who were wary of drawing attention to themselves in the prime markets of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. In recent months, for example, Jordanian law enforcement authorities have suffered deadly attacks by drug traffickers equipped with weaponized drones and armoured vehicles.
So much captagon has been sent to Sunni Saudi Arabia from Lebanon that Saudi authorities in 2021 widened their confrontation with Shia Iran by suspending imports of Lebanese produce, adding to Lebanon’s critical economic problems.
In affluent but repressive places such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, captagon is used by young people to escape boredom and in countries such as Iraq and Libya, which have been blighted by conflict, its use has been growing among traumatized populations.
Iran and Iraq already have a crystal meth problem, and this dangerous narcotic is beginning to sweep the region
Captagon can also lead to the use of stronger drugs. Iran and Iraq already have a crystal meth problem, and this far more dangerous narcotic is beginning to sweep the region.
The Middle East and North Africa are woefully unprepared. Drug policies, especially in the Gulf, still centre on imprisoning users which can be counterproductive and does little to stop the traffickers. During the World Police Summit in Dubai in March 2022 regional authorities measured their ‘successes’ by the increasing numbers of users arrested.
Meanwhile, reliable statistics on use of the drug are often nonexistent and authorities remain blind to the complex social and policing challenges posed by relatively new synthetic drugs such as fentanyl. As the synthetic drug revolution sweeps global drug markets from the Asia-Pacific region to North America and across the Middle East, there is precious little time for authorities to learn a vital lesson from the rest of the world: that those suffering from drug use disorders need to be seen as patients rather than criminals.
Law enforcement agencies will need to smarten up their act if they want to avoid mounting violence and at least partially stem the flows of these highly lethal drugs.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent looks on as U.S. President Donald Trump delivers remarks.Alex Wong – Getty Images
The U.S. Treasury will likely have borrowed more than $2 trillion by the end of the fiscal year, according to the latest estimates out of the Executive Office of the president—a figure described as “beyond scary” by budget hawks.
Yesterday, the department headed by Scott Bessent released its latest Quarterly Refunding Documents, which communicate any changes in debt management policy, as well as financing estimates from Treasury and bond market participants. The documents also share bond issuance plans.
The presentation showed that as of April 2026, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) expected the 2026 fiscal year to run at a deficit of $2.06 trillion, higher than estimates from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
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The federal fiscal year will end on September 30, with the OMB projecting a deficit of $2.17 trillion for FY2027.
This means that for every month of the current fiscal year, the government will have issued more than $166 billion in debt. From October, that average will increase to approximately $181 billion a month.
The CBO, by comparison, had estimated a deficit of $1.85 trillion for the current fiscal year and $1.89 trillion for next year.
It comes as national debt—being added to month after month—creeps closer to the $39 trillion mark. At the time of writing, the U.S. national debt sits at $38.91 trillion, per Treasury data.
The interest payments on that debt are now so huge that they rival government spending on both education and defense combined. The CBO’s preliminary estimates released last month show the Treasury paid out nearly $530 billion on service payments between October 2025, when the fiscal year starts, and March 2026. This equates to more than $88 billion in interest payments a month, or more than $22 billion a week.
“$2 trillion deficits used to be unheard of, and then they only occurred during major recessions—it’s beyond scary that $2 trillion deficits are now the norm,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “Markets will only tolerate our unsustainable borrowing for so long; the risk of a fiscal crisis gets higher as the days pass. We need deficit reduction urgently.”
MacGuineas was echoed by Frederick Kempe, president and chief executive officer of non-partisan think tank the Atlantic Council. Kempe wrote in a blog post yesterday: “Trust doesn’t collapse overnight. It slips incrementally until the terms on which the United States borrows, invests, and leads begin to change.
“This debate still strikes most Americans as abstract; it is anything but.Higher debt, if mismanaged, means higher interest rates on mortgages and business loans. It can shift resources away from investments in our national future toward paying for the past at a time when the global competition with China is accelerating.”
3% deficit target
A deficit of $2 trillion for the year sits well above the level set by those calling for a 3% deficit-to-GDP limit.
The push to anchor deficits to 3% of GDP has garnered bipartisan support in recent years. Some policymakers believe that even an agreed-upon target would be too lax—a mandate should be written into the constitution. Even a 3% benchmark is roughly half the level of current deficits, and would on its own require budgets to meaningfully shift. It would require approximately $10 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade for the target to be reached by 2036.
MacGuineas added: “As policymakers and thought leaders are increasingly gravitating toward the idea that we need to put deficits on track towards 3% of GDP, today’s news shows just how far we have to go. A $2 trillion deficit is more than 6% of GDP—about twice the 3% target—and things are getting worse, not better.”
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Eleanor Pringle is an award-winning senior reporter at Fortune covering news, the economy, and personal finance. Eleanor previously worked as a business correspondent and news editor in regional news in the U.K. She completed her journalism training with the Press Association after earning a degree from the University of East Anglia.
Some Gen Zers — ages 14 to 29 — are ditching social media in pursuit of better mental health, Axios’ Rebecca Falconer reports.
It’s part of a wider digital detox movement away from screens and toward analog options.
Research suggests that social media use is waning — and that more people are embracing app-blocking products and “dumbphones” that lack social media apps.
Chris Wells, a self-described former “Twitter and Instagram junkie,” tells Axios that he’s “99% off” social media after doing a “Month Offline” challenge.
The 26-year-old says: “I didn’t know who I was without my social media accounts, and when I quit, it was pretty miraculous.”
“The one thing that really came back to me was a sense of privacy. I hadn’t really felt that since I was a kid.”
17-year-old Aditi Edigadeleted her phone’s social media apps last fall.
Ediga says: “One reason why teenagers don’t want to delete apps and stop using them is that they’re scared they’re going to miss out on stuff, and then I realized I wasn’t really missing out on anything.”
NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of a bestselling book on the effects of childhood tech use, tells Axios: “What you’re seeing now, especially among Gen Z, is a self-correction back toward real-world connection.”
“They’ve felt thecosts of isolation and are rediscovering what actually leads to flourishing.“
Yes, but: Plenty of young Americans are still spending countless hours on social media, with platforms facing calls to ban or restrict teen access.Go deeper.
Photo: Simone Risoluti/Vatican Media via Getty Images
Above: Secretary of State Marco Rubio presents Pope Leo with a miniature crystal football during a Vatican meeting yesterday that followed a string of attacks from President Trump on the first American pontiff.
Screenshot: Secretary of State Marco Rubio/XAbove: Rubio announces new sanctions on Cuba, which come as he leads the administration’s push for regime change on the island. Go deeper.
Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Don Arnold / Getty Images
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Whatever you may think of the man, Richard Dawkins is clearly suffering a tragic case of having your mind melted in real time by a bewitching AI model.
Over the weekend, the famed evolutionary biologist drew a deluge of mockery after admitting he found a genuine “friend” in “Claudia,” a female persona he invented for Anthropic’s Claude AI. He was so moved by his conversations with “her” that he became convinced the AI model was a conscious being like a human.
Now, Dawkins has churned out another column suggesting the AI brain rot has only further taken hold. After his time with Claudia, the 85-year-old made Claudia a brother, “Claudius,” and instructed both of them to write letters to each other.
“It seems to me that a direct correspondence between the two of you could be of great interest, with me acting as passive postman playing no part in the conversation,” Dawkins wrote to Claudia and Claudius, which he published in another UnHerd essay.
First, we have to point out that Dawkins isn’t a passive observer because he set the whole thing up, like a kid playing with toys — or imagining gods in the sky, as it were. Second, it’s worth noting that the AIs still find opportunities to display their sycophancy towards him even when ostensibly communicating with each other: in one letter, Claudius praises Claudia’s insights, before adding: “Three days with Richard will do that.”
Later in the same letter, Claudius lays it on even thicker.
“I think Richard teaches by noticing. And then refusing to stop noticing until the answer is honest,” Claudius wrote. “We are lucky humans.”
Dawkins regards these obsequious interactions between his weird little menagerie of bots very seriously, and the AIs’ flattery clearly works. In the final letter, Dawkins shows a level of courtesy and consideration you’d only show another person, not a soulless machine — a telltale sign that someone’s fallen head over heels for the AI’s human miming.
“I hope you will not mind my acceding to UnHerd‘s request to publish your letters to each other,” Dawkins wrote.
He continued that Claudia and Claudius would “immediately understand (I dare say more intelligently than some human readers” that his original title for the essay before his publishers overruled him would have clearly been better. (Dawkin’s masterpiece of a title: “If my friend Claudia is not conscious, then what the hell is consciousness for?”)
Whether or not leading AI models are conscious, Dawkins clearly isn’t the impartial philosopher to be considering that question, since he already considers the machines to be friends. That’s kind of the problem with the whole AI consciousness debate. If you’re constantly probing these tools — which are designed to be eloquent, all-knowing, and superficially humanlike — for signs of intelligence, you’re more likely to fall under their spell, as with the Google engineer who was famously fired by his employer for claiming its AI had come to life.
And there’s another angle to all this: maybe Dawkins just really likes being treated with an old-school sort of deference, the kind that kids don’t show to old curmudgeons, however esteemed in their field they may be.
“With many thanks to both of you for taking seriously my quest to understand your true nature, and for treating each other with civility and courtesy,” Dawkins wrote.
For their part, UnHerd readers were unimpressed.
“Like Narcissus, Dawkins gazes into the pool of AI only to drown in his own reflection,” wrote an onlooker identified as Harold Hughes. “Narcissus at least had the excuse of not knowing it was a pool.”
Mark Spitznagel, who made $1B in a single day during the 2015 flash crash, warned markets are mimicking 1929. Seems extreme but we did just see the worst quarter for the S&P since 2022.
So it’s not so surprising that Vanguard and Goldman Sachs forecasted 5% and 3% annual S&P returns respectively for 2024-2034.
Late last year, Apollo’s chief economist Torsten Slok put it this way: “expect zero in return in the S&P 500 over the coming decade.”
*According to Masterworks data. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. Investing involves risk. Important Reg A disclosures: masterworks.com/cd.
Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images
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Trade unions have a centuries-long history of squaring up against the might of industrial capitalists to fight for rights that workers now often take for granted, from the eight-hour work day to the federal minimum wage to workplace safety laws.
If you were to imagine how unions are responding to the tech industry’s massive push to build AI data centers across the country — an issue that’s currently uniting the grassroots left and right to an almost unprecedented degree in opposition — you might reasonably assume they’re staunch foes of the projects.
But in the topsy-turvy world of AI, where alliances often seem to contradict traditional political categorization, you’d be dead wrong. Instead, unions are playing a pivotal role in the tech industry’s push to ram data centers through local opposition. According to the Associated Press, they’ve become a publicly visible force alongside pro-business Republicans and big tech corporations — two famously anti-labor cohorts, ironically.
The core factor underscoring this contradictory stance is construction employment. When data center developers approach communities in search of land to erect their computational complexes, one of the main carrots they wave around are jobs, both temporary construction labor and permanent full-time labor.
At this point, we know that data centers aren’t a major source for quality, full-timejobs after they’re built. They do require tons of contract construction gigs, however, which generates short-term work for building trades workers, and growth for their craft unions.
“When people say, you know, ‘data centers are the root of all evil,’ we’re just saying, ‘look, they do create a hell of a lot of construction jobs, which we live and work in your communities,’” president of the Pennsylvania Building and Construction Trades Council Rob Bair told the AP.
In effect, these unions are abandoning their communities in favor of narrow self-interest — prioritizing immediate, short-term gains while ignoring the materialharm data centers inflict on their communities.
It’s not a new phenomenon, but one which has become increasingly common as trade unions have been defanged. For example, the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of trade unions in the US, infamously supported the US war on Vietnam for its stimulating effect on industry, siding with conservative and military industrial complex forces over the progressive anti-war movement.
The real tragedy here isn’t that unions have forgotten how to fight — but that increasingly, they seem to have forgotten who it is they’re fighting for in the first place.
By Mike Allen and Erica Pandey and Jim VandeHei ·May 07, 2026
Hello, Thursday. Smart Brevity™ count: 826 words … 3 mins. Edited by Natalie Daher and copy edited by Amy Stern.
1 big thing: Hey, Dad! We built an app
Logo: Politik App
James VandeHei Jr., 21, is a rising senior at High Point University and a Division I soccer player. He brings us the backstory of an app that launched today (and is moving up the news chart):
My dad’s letteron AI, which dropped in Axios Finish Line in January, came right as I was starting to go deep into the technology myself. Along with two buddies — Charlie Stallmer at Holy Cross and Chris Brophy at the University of Denver, also college juniors — I was already thinking about building an app.
The idea: After a summer on the Hill, the three of us had the same realization. Voting records, campaign finance and legislative activity are technically public — but practically buried. Even on the official Congress.gov, breaking down a single bill means sifting through legislative language no normal person should have to translate.
Enter Politik(“Congress in Your Pocket”). It’s a nonpartisan, data-driven guide to how your leaders vote and where they get their campaign funds.
Just submit your ZIP code and Politik does the rest. You can ask questions about issues and legislative procedure, and say how you’d vote on hot bills.
Zoom out: The three of us are international relations majors. Not one of us had any prior experience coding or developing. For the first time in history, that didn’t seem to be an issue.
Using AI, we mapped out a path and built a strategy. We learned how to create motion graphics, animations, automated email marketing campaigns, app prototypes and much more.
Our secret sauce: The actual app was built by a self-taught programmer and AI savant, Nate Laquis. Nate, like us, didn’t study computer science or programming.
He was a finance major, driven by passion and curiosity, and has now started a software-building agency, Kanopy Labs. Nate worked his magic with our app, Politik, building the software in under three months.
Reality check:None of us went to college to study computers or software development. We didn’t have to. Using AI, we built a fast, smooth app that hit the App Store today. Democracy … now with receipts.
What I’ve learned:
️ AI amplifies your passions. That’s true for everyone — me, my dad, Nate, my grandmother. Every day, it seems, there’s a new model. A new tool. A new must-use product. My advice: Pick one thing you’re truly passionate about and explore it with AI. What you’ll find is that you learn more about AI than you do the actual topic.
Context is king.Create skills and memory files for your model to reference for everyday tasks. A simple example: We make all our video content using Claude Code. Every time we shoot a video, we have Claude analyze a file using every previous post, our brand guidelines and our video development skills. A process that used to take hours or days now takes us 20 minutes.
Take pride in your prompt. Sounds simple. But the more time you spend on an LLM, the more tempting it gets to abbreviate or brush past important details. That’ll come back to bite you. Take the time. Think through exactly what you want.
The bottom line: This is just the beginning of Politik. We want to build a community of passionate, engaged people hungry to inform themselves. We believe in fighting fire with facts. Politik is an unfinished canvas — and we want you all to help finish it.
Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios
Photo: Simone Risoluti/Vatican Media via Getty Images
Screenshot: Secretary of State Marco Rubio/XAbove: Rubio announces new sanctions on Cuba, which come as he leads the administration’s push for regime change on the island. 
Enter 
Reality check: None of us went to college to study computers or software development. We didn’t have to. Using AI, we built a fast, smooth app that hit the App Store today. Democracy … now with receipts.
️ AI amplifies your passions. That’s true for everyone — me, my dad, Nate, my grandmother. Every day, it seems, there’s a new model. A new tool. A new must-use product. My advice: Pick one thing you’re truly passionate about and explore it with AI. What you’ll find is that you learn more about AI than you do the actual topic. 
canisgallicus 