Author: Nicole Lee, Adjunct Professor at the National Drug Research Institute (Melbourne based), Curtin University

After the fall of the al-Assad regime in Syria, large stockpiles of the illicit drug captagon have reportedly been uncovered. The stockpiles, found by Syrian rebels, are believed to be linked to al-Assad military headquarters, implicating the fallen regime in the drug’s manufacture and distribution. But as we’ll see, captagon was once a pharmaceutical drug, similar to some of the legally available stimulants we still use today for conditions including attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Captagon was once a pharmaceutical Captagon is the original brand name of an old synthetic pharmaceutical stimulant originally made in Germany in the 1960s. It was…