| The other question is who he associated with in addition to his narco pals — ISIS, Al Qaeda, Olde Saddam Hussein Baathists, Iran, one of the tribes... |
The term Lexus is often used for captagon pills that have higher quality and purity.
Containing an amphetamine-type stimulant, captagon was the name of a trade drug patented in Germany in the early 1960s. It was used to treat attention deficit, narcolepsy, and other conditions before it was banned.
Following 2011 and the Syrian civil war, the illicit captagon pills started spreading in several countries across the Middle East, with the main supplier being the war-torn Syria itself.
According to AFP, while Syria is the Middle East’s main producer of captagon, the main consumer in the region is Iraq’s southern neighbor Saudi Arabia
...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual hajj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. Fifteen of the nineteen WTC hijackers were Saudis, and most major jihadi commanders were Saudis, to include Osama bin Laden. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman quietly folded that tent in 2016, doing terrible things to the guys running it, and has since been dragging the kingdom into the current century...Syria has effectively been turned into a narco-state, concluded an investigation by the New York Times
... which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize...
in 2021 revealing that more than 250 million captagon pills were seized around the world that year.
Officials have scrutinized the Syrian government, claiming their major involvement in the drug trade.
Iraqi security forces in late April said they had broken up a drug trafficking ring and seized over six million pills of the amphetamine-type stimulant captagon.
It sounded impressive at the time, but now not so much.
According to research by the New Lines Institute released in April, the captagon trade in the Middle East topped $5 billion in 2021, an increase from $3.5 billion in 2020. The General Directorate of Narcotics Control in the Ministry of Interior in June confirmed that it had arrested more than 20,000 drug users and seized millions of narcotic pills and more than 500,000 kilos of psychotropic substances during the last two years and a half.