It’s also highly addictive, and costs about $20 per tablet. This drug, also known as Fenethylline, has been around since the 60s and used to be used to combat depression and, bizarrely, hyperactivity in the pre-Prozac days. Add a few professional mercenaries, a lot of other people’s money, and you get I.S. as we know it.
Use of amphetamines in war isn’t new, either. The Japanese and others used variants for combat performance and endurance, and the results were much the same. The theory is that troops which are hyper-alert and highly stimulated can keep going under the stresses and ultra-fatigue of combat.
Amphetamines, aka speed/crystal meth/ whatever, are bad news all round. They’re bad for users, bad for anyone around users, and they scramble thinking very efficiently. People do dumb things they wouldn’t otherwise do. They scramble judgement, too, and the reports of I.S. users feeling no fear are a good description of the basically delusional mentality.
Captagon does harm users. It’s actually a major drug problem in the Middle East. Amphetamines typically do liver and organ damage. They put the body under severe stress, and the usual effects are cumulative. Captagon seems to be a pretty highly concentrated version of ice in many ways, promoting aggression and in the case of I.S., behavioral weirdness.
Syria, predictably enough, is now a major producer of these drugs. The Middle East, in fact is the sole market for Captagon, and guess where the drugs go.
One of the more amusing symptoms, in a black humor way, is the “increased talkativeness” of users. After the last decade or so of endless babble from drug-addled fanatics, it’s nice to know. It’d be terrible if any group of motormouths that talked as much crap as these guys did it naturally.
