Drug Trafficking
What Is the Air Force Doing on the Southern Border?
Militaries exist, in most contexts, to help nations preserve their borders. In that sense, the application of U.S. assets towards stemming illegal immigration is a commonsense application of military might.
4 Reasons Kamala Harris Keeps Dodging Her Border Czar Failures
Kamala Harris spent the last three years leading America’s response to the border crisis but refuses to discuss it. Honestly, who can blame her? Under her watch as America’s chief...
Tackling the Middle East’s Captagon Conundrum
The 2023 World Drug Report highlights the growing concern over the trafficking of amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS) across the Middle East, noting the expanding market for Captagon®, the trademark name of...
Iran’s Pink Tide Friends in Latin America
Lebanese Hezbollah has maintained a presence in Latin America for several decades. Its attack on the Jewish social organization Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) in 1994 was, according to a...
Fentanyl Is a Weapon of Mass Destruction
On September 11, 2001, nineteen terrorists slammed commercial airliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. This unprecedented attack against the United States killed 3,000...
Taliban Frees U.S. Hostage in Swap for Afghan Drug Lord
The U.S. government announced on Monday that it had conducted a prisoner exchange with the Taliban-led government of Afghanistan, freeing an American civil engineer and U.S. Navy veteran from the...
War Drugs: Syria Seizes 14 Million Captagon Amphetamine Pills
Syria’s Interior Ministry reported on Wednesday that law enforcement officers had seized fourteen million pills of “Captagon,” a popular amphetamine widely manufactured in Syria and sold throughout the Middle East,...
The United States Can Counter Out of Control Captagon Smuggling
On July 1, 2020, the United States’ Syria policy received a wake-up call. At the Port of Salerno in Italy, authorities identified eighty-five million tablets of captagon, an illicit amphetamine-type drug...
Turkey Could Become the Middle East’s Next Narco-State
The assassination of the Turkish Cypriot casino tycoon Halil Falyali last week was the latest episode in Turkey’s underground wars over narco-trafficking and illicit finance. The Turkish mobster-turned-whistleblower Sedat Peker...
Thousands of Amphetamine Pills Seized at Lebanese Port
Lebanese security forces have uncovered an attempt to smuggle nine million pills of Captagon, an amphetamine drug popular in the Middle East, through the port of Beirut. The country’s customs agency...
The U.S. Needs to Step Up Its Game Against Drug Trafficking in the Caribbean
Introduction On April 1, President Trump announced that the United States isdoubling its counternarcotics operations in the Western Hemisphere. The administration is concerned that illicit actors in Venezuela will exploit the focus...
Study: Drug Dealers Slinging Steroids on Social Media
Drug dealers are using social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube to sell illicit appearance and performance enhancing drugs (APEDs). The Digital Citizens Alliance (DCA) purchased some...