Riyadh: Those found guilty of drug trafficking face the death penalty in Saudi Arabia. Of a total of 217 executions since the start of 2025, 144 have been put to death for drug-related offences. If the pace of executions continues, this year's total will surpass that of 2024, when 338 people were executed in the kingdom - the most since 1990.

According to France24.com, at the heart of this crackdown is the illegal amphetamine-like drug captagon, which is very much in demand in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, the Arab world's largest economy, is one of its main consumers, according to the UN. Human rights activists argue that capital punishment is detrimental to the image of tolerance and modernity that the kingdom seeks to project. Following the global outcry over the 2018 murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Riyadh needed to do something to polish its international image, says Karim Sader, a political scientist, and consultant specializing in the Gulf states. So, it instituted a 33-month moratorium on executions for drug offenses. It resumed these executions in November 2022, and Sader says the recent surge in executions is largely due to the backlog that resulted from the suspension.

But the deaths of these foreign immigrant dealers will attract far less media coverage than Saudi dissidents sentenced to death for political reasons, he says. "The war on drugs justifies everything," Sader says. Domestic political concerns are the main rationale behind the current crusade against captagon. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is concerned that Saudi society will be corrupted by the scourge of drugs, and he wants to avoid this, even if it means using brutal means and shocking international organizations - especially Western ones. Taking a hard line is also politically expedient, given that the crown prince - who initiated a modest opening up of Saudi Arabia's authoritarian Islamic society - also has to contend with the conservative fringes of Saudi society. For them, drug-related crimes should be punishable by death, Sader says. "The Saudi authorities hope that by hitting hard enough, they will succeed in dissuading drug trafficking," he says.

The director of public security, Mohammed al-Bassami, in June reported "tangible positive results, with hard blows dealt to traffickers and smugglers", according to the influential Saudi daily Okaz. But Sader suggests that a successful anti-drug campaign must be multi-pronged. "We know that in the face of the drug challenge, repression alone is not enough," he says.

In the fight against captagon, sometimes called the "poor man's cocaine," Riyadh can count on at least one regional ally: Ahmed al-Sharaa, Syria's interim president. The day his rebel forces seized power in Damascus in December 2024, al-Sharaa referred to captagon in his victory speech. Syria has become the biggest producer of captagon on Earth, he said. During Syria's 14-year-long civil war, captagon became the country's most important export. Syria was producing 80 percent of the world's captagon by 2023. Captagon production came to be the main source of revenue for Syria, a country shattered by war and hit hard by international sanctions. Assad's closest allies were among the main beneficiaries of the multi-billion-dollar drug trade.

Six months after the fall of Assad, the transitional Syrian authorities announced in June that all captagon production facilities had been seized. Meanwhile, in Lebanon, Hezbollah - which has also profited from captagon trafficking - has been considerably weakened by the war with Israel. But while these trends might curtail the traffic in captagon, they are unlikely to bring an end to it. "The fall of Assad and the weakening of Hezbollah will help to stop captagon being trafficked to Saudi Arabia," Sader says. "But we will never be able to stop 100 percent of it."