怪不得去年那么亲密，原来是老乡见老乡。

The fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad overturned the most profitable drug-smuggling network in the Middle East, exposing the former regime’s role in manufacturing and trafficking pills that fueled war and social crises across the region.

Captagon, a methamphetamine-like drug that has been produced for years in Syrian labs, helped the Assad regime amass huge wealth and offset the impact of punishing international sanctions, while also allowing allies such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia to profit from its trade.

Days after they ousted Assad in a lightning offensive last week, rebels circulated videos from industrial-scale manufacturing and trafficking facilities inside government air bases and other sites affiliated with former top regime officials.

Among the locations where rebels discovered the alleged captagon factories and storage facilities were the Mazzeh air base in Damascus, a car-trading company in the Assad family’s hometown of Latakia and a former potato-chips factory in Douma near the capital believed to be affiliated with the ex-president’s brother. Footage by rebels and by journalists who filmed the sites at their invitation, including Reuters and Britain’s Channel 4 News, showed thousands of captagon pills hidden in fake fruit, ceramic mosaics and electrical equipment. They have said they destroyed at least some of the stored captagon.

Source: Assad’s Fall Upends the Middle East’s Captagon Drug Empire – WSJ