Tag Archives: drug

Despite the fall of Assad, the illicit drug trade in Syria is far from over

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Despite the current government’s hostility to the trade, the country remains a hub for the production and distribution of the drug.

During the country’s long-running civil war, the Assad regime was hit by sanctions and diplomatic isolation, and the trade in Captagon is believed to have brought in billions of dollars for the dictator and his allies.

The country’s attitude towards the trade changed markedly after the fall of Assad in December 2024, and the rise to power of a transitional government led by members of the Islamist group HTS and comprising members of many of Syria’s ethnic groups. The current administration has pledged to disrupt the supply chain and has demonstrated this by publicly destroying large quantities of seized Captagon.

Thousands of people gathered in Damascus on Friday to celebrate the fall of the Assad regime.

However, the most recent edition of the World Drugs Report, released by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) on 26 June, warns that Syria remains a major hub for the drug, despite the crackdown.

Ahead of the launch, Angela Me, the head of social affairs at UNODC, talked to UN News about the continued use of Captagon in the region,

Angela Me: Captagon is a stimulant, similar to methamphetamine, which is taken as a pill, and for many years it has been the main drug of concern in the Gulf state and parts of North Africa.

It was called the “Jihadi pill” after it was found that the perpetrators of some terrorist attacks had used it. On the battlefield it helps to maintain energy, which is one reason it is so widespread. But users quickly become dependent, and it causes physical and mental health problems.

UN News: The transitional government of Syria has indicated that they do not tolerate this trade, but your report shows that Syria is still a big hub for Captagon. Who is producing and selling?

Angela Me: There is a lot of uncertainty around that. We see a lot of large shipments going from Syria through, for example, Jordan. There are probably still stocks of the substance being shipped out, but we’re looking at where the production may be shifting to. We’re also seeing that the trafficking is expanding regionally, and we’ve discovered labs in Libya.

UN News: Given the large amounts of money generated by drugs, are there still groups in Syria that would like to carry on the trade in the parts of the country they control?

Angela Me: Definitely, and not only in Syria, but also in the wider region. These groups have been managing Captagon for a long time, and production is not going to stop in a matter of days or weeks.

We are helping countries to tackle the problem from an organised crime perspective, to understand the criminal groups involved, so that they can design responses and solutions: our research shows that there is not one single response to dismantle the groups.

We also help law enforcement to connect with their peers in the region, because this is not a national problem. It’s clearly a transnational problem which goes beyond the Middle East; we have been seeing Captagon traffic through Europe, for example.

Another way we can support is by addressing the health-related issues, sharing evidence-based treatment that can really help people to recover from their dependence on the drug.

Exponential rise in synthetic drug production and trafficking in the Golden Triangle

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According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the production and trafficking of methamphetamine – an illegal synthetic stimulant – have risen sharply since 2021, particularly in Myanmar’s Shan State.

UNODC emphasised that both the scale of production and the flow of trafficking in Shan State have “significantly” increased over the past few years.

Record seizures

A record 236 tons of methamphetamine (commonly known as meth) was seized in East and Southeast Asia in 2024, a 24 per cent increase from 2023.

However, “the 236 tons represent only the amount seized” and it’s likely that much more is reaching the streets and illicit market, said Benedikt Hofmann from UNODC, describing the amount as “unprecedented.”

Seizures in Southeast Asia represent 85 per cent of the total, with Thailand alone seizing one billion meth tablets.

Conducive conditions

While Thailand remains the main transit and destination point, the drug is mostly produced in Myanmar’s Shan State.

Amid the ongoing civil war involving multiple armed groups, Myanmar’s military regime is experiencing instability and governance challenges that are fuelling the illicit production of synthetic and other drugs.

Although certain areas of Myanmar have been spared from the ongoing conflict and remain stable, “the ongoing crisis in Myanmar is further increasing the need for proceeds from the drug trade,” said Mr. Hofmann.

“This combination of conflict and stability has created favourable conditions for the expansion of drug production impacting countries across the region and beyond,” he said.

Expanding trafficking routes

One of the fastest-growing meth trafficking routes in East and Southeast Asia stretches from Myanmar’s Shan State to Cambodia.

Cambodian authorities notably reported seizing nearly 10 tons of methamphetamine in 2024, representing “by far the largest methamphetamine seizure in history,” said UNODC.

“The trafficking route connecting Cambodia with Myanmar, primarily through Lao People’s Democratic Republic, has been rapidly expanding,” said Inshik Sim, an analyst with UNODC.

As transnational drug trafficking groups continue to exploit new routes to avoid law enforcement, the trafficking corridors connecting Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines are becoming another “increasingly significant corridor,” Mr. Sim added.

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Improving clinical trials with machine learning

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Machine learning could improve our ability to determine whether a new drug works in the brain, potentially enabling researchers to detect drug effects that would be missed entirely by conventional statistical tests, finds a new UCL study published in Brain.

“Current statistical models are too simple. They fail to capture complex biological variations across people, discarding them as mere noise. We suspected this could partly explain why so many drug trials work in simple animals but fail in the complex brains of humans. If so, machine learning capable of modelling the human brain in its full complexity may uncover treatment effects that would otherwise be missed,” said the study’s lead author, Dr Parashkev Nachev (UCL Institute of Neurology).

To test the concept, the research team looked at large-scale data from patients with stroke, extracting the complex anatomical pattern of brain damage caused by the stroke in each patient, creating in the process the largest collection of anatomically registered images of stroke ever assembled. As an index of the impact of stroke, they used gaze direction, objectively measured from the eyes as seen on head CT scans upon hospital admission, and from MRI scans typically done 1-3 days later.

They then simulated a large-scale meta-analysis of a set of hypothetical drugs, to see if treatment effects of different magnitudes that would have been missed by conventional statistical analysis could be identified with machine learning. For example, given a drug treatment that shrinks a brain lesion by 70%, they tested for a significant effect using conventional (low-dimensional) statistical tests as well as by using high-dimensional machine learning methods.

The machine learning technique took into account the presence or absence of damage across the entire brain, treating the stroke as a complex “fingerprint”, described by a multitude of variables.

“Stroke trials tend to use relatively few, crude variables, such as the size of the lesion, ignoring whether the lesion is centred on a critical area or at the edge of it. Our algorithm learned the entire pattern of damage across the brain instead, employing thousands of variables at high anatomical resolution. By illuminating the complex relationship between anatomy and clinical outcome, it enabled us to detect therapeutic effects with far greater sensitivity than conventional techniques,” explained the study’s first author, Tianbo Xu (UCL Institute of Neurology).

The advantage of the machine learning approach was particularly strong when looking at interventions that reduce the volume of the lesion itself. With conventional low-dimensional models, the intervention would need to shrink the lesion by 78.4% of its volume for the effect to be detected in a trial more often than not, while the high-dimensional model would more than likely detect an effect when the lesion was shrunk by only 55%.

“Conventional statistical models will miss an effect even if the drug typically reduces the size of the lesion by half, or more, simply because the complexity of the brain’s functional anatomy–when left unaccounted for–introduces so much individual variability in measured clinical outcomes. Yet saving 50% of the affected brain area is meaningful even if it doesn’t have a clear impact on behaviour. There’s no such thing as redundant brain,” said Dr Nachev.

The researchers say their findings demonstrate that machine learning could be invaluable to medical science, especially when the system under study–such as the brain–is highly complex.

“The real value of machine learning lies not so much in automating things we find easy to do naturally, but formalising very complex decisions. Machine learning can combine the intuitive flexibility of a clinician with the formality of the statistics that drive evidence-based medicine. Models that pull together 1000s of variables can still be rigorous and mathematically sound. We can now capture the complex relationship between anatomy and outcome with high precision,” said Dr Nachev.

“We hope that researchers and clinicians begin using our methods the next time they need to run a clinical trial,” said co-author Professor Geraint Rees (Dean, UCL Faculty of Life Sciences).

Gold specks raise hopes for better cancer treatments

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A tiny medical device containing gold specks could boost the effects of cancer medication and reduce its harm, research suggests.

Scientists have completed a study which showed that gold increased the effectiveness of drugs used to treat lung cancer cells.

Experts say that the findings could help researchers use the device to reduce side effects of current chemotherapies by precisely targeting diseased cells without damaging healthy tissue.

Gold is a safe chemical element and has the ability to accelerate – or catalyse – chemical reactions.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh discovered properties of the precious metal that allow these catalytic abilities to be accessed in living things without any side effects.

Minute fragments, known as gold nanoparticles, were encased in a chemical device by the research team to control these highly-specific reactions in exact locations.

The device was shown to catalyse a directed chemical reaction when implanted in the brain of zebrafish, suggesting it can be used in living animals.

Gold nanoparticles also activated anti-cancer medicines that had been applied to lung cancer cells in a dish, increasing the drugs’ effectiveness.

Some 450 people die from cancer every day in the UK. A cancer diagnosis is made every two minutes. Medications are improving, but often damage healthy cells.

The study was carried out in collaboration with researchers at the University of Zaragoza’s Institute of Nanoscience of Aragon in Spain. It was part-funded by Cancer Research UK (CRUK), and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and is published in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

Dr Asier Unciti-Broceta from the University of Edinburgh’s CRUK Edinburgh Centre, said: “We have discovered new properties of gold that were previously unknown and our findings suggest that the metal could be used to release drugs inside tumours very safely.

“There is still work to do before we can use this on patients, but this study is a step forward. We hope that a similar device in humans could one day be implanted by surgeons to activate chemotherapy directly in tumours and reduce harmful effects to healthy organs.”

Dr Áine McCarthy, Cancer Research UK’s senior science information officer said: “By developing new, better ways of delivering cancer drugs, studies like this have the potential to improve cancer treatment and reduce side effects. In particular, it could help improve treatment for brain tumours and other hard-to-treat cancers. The next steps will be to see if this method is safe to use in people, what its long- and short-term side effects are, and if it’s a better way to treat some cancers.”