LONDON: Security and government officials from Jordan, the Syrian Arab Republic, Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon participated in a regional meeting in Amman to discuss ways to combat synthetic drugs that are affecting communities in the Middle East.
The three-day meeting was held on Monday by Jordan’s Public Security Directorate, in cooperation with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and the Naif Arab University for Security Sciences, according to the Jordan News Agency.
Maj. Gen. Obaidallah Maaytah, director-general of the PSD, said the meeting aims to enhance security and judicial responses to cross-border drug threats and to exchange best practices in monitoring the production, trafficking, and distribution of synthetic drugs.
The first meeting between the five countries and the UN to discuss the issue of synthetic drugs was held last year in the Saudi capital, Riyadh.
UNODC’s 2026 report highlighted that captagon remains a dominant synthetic drug in the Middle East despite the seizure of large quantities by Syrian and Lebanese authorities since the fall of the Bashar Assad regime in December 2024. Syria under Assad became a hub for the production and distribution of captagon, and the government largely ignored the concerns of neighboring countries about the negative effects that this was having on the region.
Since late 2024, authorities across the Arab region have intercepted at least 177 million captagon tablets, according to figures published last year by UNODC.
Jordanian authorities announce several monthly incidents of intercepting drug smuggling attempts through its border with Syria and Iraq. Smuggling networks have long attempted to exploit Jordan’s geographic location in the heart of the Middle East as a transit point for smuggling drugs that are typically bound for Gulf countries.
