Captagon

Captagon is the marketing name for Fenetylline and relatively unknown to Western consumers while it enjoys great popularity in the Middle East. In Central Europe the amphetamine first emerged in the 1980s as doping in football. It was also used for the treatment and improvement of children––those who don’t want to solve math problems for hours at a stretch (ADHD)––before it was banned in most countries in 1986.
Quite interesting is Captagon’s role in the Syrian conflict. As the war drags on, it is all the more likely that Captagon is funding most warring parties in the conflict. Six cargo trucks destined for Saudi Arabia and owned by a Sunni Syrian clan long linked to the drug trade were captured in Lebanon. The trucks had six million pills on board, that would buy a lot of guns. In one month, Lebanese authorities confiscated more than 200 million Dollars worth of the potent amphetamine.
Captagon was manufactured and trafficked in Eastern Europe in the early 2000s, and didn’t really take off in the Middle East until 2006, when the Hizballah in the wake of the Israel-Hizballah war and the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon desperatly needed money.
In terms of profit, amphetamines are not to beat. Other than cocaine or heroin, the base ingredients are legal. A pill which costs pennies to produce in Lebanon retails for up to 20 Dollars a pop in Saudi Arabia, where some 55 million Captagon tablets are seized per year.