CQFD ? :-)
(A noter, une petite charge anti-Hezbollah dans le papier. Perfide Albion oblige.)
« Captagon: the amphetamine fuelling Syria’s civil war »
The drug, widely used in the Middle East but unknown elsewhere, is keeping fighters on their feet during gruelling battles and generating money for more weapons.
▻http://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2014/jan/13/captagon-amphetamine-syria-war-middle-east?CMP=fb_gu
Separate investigations by the news agency Reuters and Time magazine have found that the growing trade in Syrian-made Captagon – an amphetamine widely consumed in the Middle East but almost unknown elsewhere – generated revenues of millions of dollars inside the country last year, some of which was almost certainly used to fund weapons, while combatants on both sides are reportedly turning to the stimulant to help them keep fighting. (...)
Captagon, the trademark name for the synthetic stimulant fenethylline, was first produced in the 1960s to treat hyperactivity, narcolepsy and depression, but was banned in most countries by the 1980s as too addictive. It remains hugely popular in the Middle East; Saudi Arabia alone seizes some 55m tablets a year, perhaps 10% of the total thought to be smuggled into the kingdom.
The drug is cheap and simple to produce, using ingredients that are easy and often legal to obtain, yet sells for up to $20 a tablet. A Lebanese psychiatrist, Ramzi Haddad, said that Captagon had “the typical effects of a stimulant”, producing “a kind of euphoria. You’re talkative, you don’t sleep, you don’t eat, you’re energetic.”
Those effects explain why fighters from most of the warring parties in the conflict – with the exception of al Qaida-linked groups, which mostly hold to a strict interpretation of Islamic law – are now said to be making extensive use of Captagon, often on night missions or during particularly gruelling battles. But doctors and psychiatrists say use of the drug is also becoming widespread among Syria’s increasingly desperate civilian population.