This is from shortly before the current upheaval in Syria - and surprising, for me, at least.
How Syria Became the Middle East’s Drug Dealer
Bashar al-Assad has propped up his regime by exploiting the Middle East’s love of an amphetamine called captagon.
By Ed Caesar
Michael Kenney, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who researches the transnational drug trade, told me that although the term “narco-state” is often misused, it describes Syria perfectly. Assad’s regime has become dependent on captagon, much the way Bolivia’s government relied on the cocaine trade in the early eighties, and the Taliban stayed afloat on opium revenue during the years that it was fighting U.S. forces for control of Afghanistan. Kenney said of the Assad regime, “State institutions have been thoroughly penetrated and corrupted by drug activities. Significant elements of the Army, of the security apparatus, are directly involved in various aspects of the trade. And the government itself—to the extent that there is one—has become heavily reliant on the revenues from captagon exports in order to maintain its governance.”...
Syrian smugglers now use a variety of cunning techniques to move their drugs to Jordan, including drones and carrier pigeons, which have been taught to fly with tiny bags of contraband affixed to their legs. More than once in recent months, smugglers have fired consignments of captagon across the border inside surface-to-air missiles fitted with tracking devices that allow criminal colleagues in Jordan to find them after they land.
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/11/11/how-syria-became-the-middle-easts-drug-dealer