| Ed Caesar
Contributing staff writer When I told a friend of mine who works in the music business in the Middle East that I wanted to write a story about the region’s robust trade in the amphetamine captagon, he told me to forget the whole thing. Nobody was going to talk to me about getting high in the Middle East. Certainly, the story presented some reporting challenges. The drug is made and shipped in the war-ravaged state of Syria; its production is dominated by sanctioned members of the Assad regime; and its biggest market is in Saudi Arabia, which is not the most journalist-friendly jurisdiction.  A storage room in Jordan’s anti-narcotics directorate contains thousands of captagon pills and other drugs seized along the Syrian border. | Photograph by Moises Saman / Magnum for The New Yorker I started in Jordan, which has become a key overland route for captagon from Syria to Saudi Arabia, as well as an increasingly fertile user market itself. Officials in Jordan were, in fact, open to talking about the captagon issue. I was particularly struck by how much detail the anti-narcotics directorate wanted to offer about Jordan’s violent clashes with Syrian traffickers on its northern border. Saudi Arabia proved a tougher proposition, but it was important to visit the Kingdom if I wanted to write about captagon. At first, no Saudis wished to talk to me, despite the size of the captagon problem there. Eventually, at a boxing match in Riyadh, I bonded with an official of the royal court. He began making phone calls on my behalf. Several days later, I was given a briefing that was illuminating. (Who said boxing was bad for you?) The resulting piece, I hope, tells the long history and knotty present of a drug whose power is more political than pharmaceutical—a pill that has turned Syria into a narco-state. | 
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