Riyadh: Those found guilty of drug trafficking face the death penalty in Saudi Arabia. Of a total of 217 executions since the start of 2025, 144 individuals have been put to death for drug-related offenses. If the pace of executions continues, this year’s total will surpass that of 2024, when 338 people were executed in the kingdom – the most since 1990.
According to France24.com, at the heart of this crackdown is the illegal amphetamine-like drug captagon, which is in high demand in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia, the Arab world’s largest economy, is one of its main consumers, as noted by the UN. Human rights activists argue that capital punishment is detrimental to the image of tolerance and modernity that the kingdom seeks to project. Kristine Beckerle, Amnesty’s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, emphasized, “We are witnessing a truly horrifying trend, with foreign nationals being put to death at a startling rate for crimes that should never carry the death penalty.”
Following the global outcry over the 2018 murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Riyadh needed to take action to “polish its international image,” says Karim Sader, a political scientist and consultant specializing in the Gulf states. As a result, a 33-month moratorium on executions for drug offenses was instituted. However, it resumed these executions in November 2022, and Sader suggests that the recent surge in executions is largely due to the backlog that resulted from the suspension.
Domestic political concerns are the main rationale behind the current crusade against captagon, Sader asserts. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is determined to prevent Saudi society from being corrupted by the scourge of drugs, even if it involves using brutal means and shocking international organizations – especially Western ones. “The war on drugs justifies everything,” Sader states. The hardline approach is politically expedient, given that the crown prince, who initiated a modest opening up of Saudi Arabia’s authoritarian Islamic society, also has to contend with the conservative fringes of Saudi society. “For them, drug-related crimes should be punishable by death,” Sader says.
The director of public security, Mohammed al-Bassami, reported in June “tangible positive results, with hard blows dealt to traffickers and smugglers,” as stated by the influential Saudi daily Okaz. Yet, Sader suggests that a successful anti-drug campaign must be multi-pronged. “We know that in the face of the drug challenge, repression alone is not enough,” he says.
In the fight against captagon, sometimes called the “poor man’s cocaine,” Riyadh can count on at least one regional ally: Ahmed al-Sharaa, Syria’s interim president. The day his rebel forces seized power in Damascus in December 2024, al-Sharaa referred to captagon in his victory speech, emphasizing Syria’s previous role as the biggest producer of captagon on Earth. Six months after the fall of Assad, the transitional Syrian authorities announced in June that all captagon production facilities had been seized.
Meanwhile, in Lebanon, Hezbollah – which has also profited from captagon trafficking – has been considerably weakened by the war with Israel. Sader notes, “The fall of Assad and the weakening of Hezbollah will help to stop captagon being trafficked to Saudi Arabia. But we will never be able to stop 100 percent of it.”