Crime and punishment

Not much is known about Captagon prevalence in Lebanon. Anecdotal testimony regarding court cases and rehabilitation treatments suggest that use is low but rising. The prevailing explanation for this is that there is a leakage of pills into the drug-using community as more Captagon is produced in the country and trafficked through it, but there are no statistics to verify the extent. What is known is that individuals caught using the drug are arrested and that there is deficient data on the number of Captagon-specific criminal proceedings. When arrested, users are thrown into a state of limbo that drug users generally face when they are arrested in Lebanon. “Drugs have spread so much in the last few years,” says Faisal Abdallah, a Lebanese lawyer specialized in criminal law. Executive was not able to obtain statistics on drug-related criminal proceedings, neither in general nor specific to Captagon – the Ministry of