Saudi Arabia dials up its ‘war on drugs’

The masked official at the port of Jeddah takes a blade to the plasterboard, revealing millions of sandy-coloured amphetamine pills stuffed inside a shipment of construction material.

At a crossing with Jordan, border guards seize more than 300,000 tablets of the stimulant captagon hidden in the fuel tanks and spare tire compartments of trucks. In south-western Najran, authorities execute six people for trying to smuggle hashish and amphetamine.

The incidents, all from this month, are among a stream of near-daily updates from Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Interior, part of a sweeping and brutal campaign it has described as a “war on drugs” launched to combat the escalating crisis.

Saudi Arabia has long been a prime target for drug smugglers in the region seeking to exploit its long desert borders with countries including Jordan and Yemen to access what they see as a major consumer market.

Saudi doctors and researchers say drug use is growing. This is partly fuelled by the proliferation of drugs like captagon, but also partly, they say, by social dislocation resulting from rapid top-down social and economic changes implemented under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that have left some in Saudi society more vulnerable than before.

“To be honest, it is a growing problem,” said a doctor who works with addiction patients in the kingdom’s Eastern Province. “Drug use is increasing.”

Official alarm over drug abuse has sparked a dramatic change in tactics, ranging from new rules allowing private rehabilitation centres for the first time, to the end of a moratorium on executions for drug crimes, reinstating one of the world’s harshest punishment regimes.

The kingdom has carried out nearly 100 executions for drug-related crimes so far this year, up from just two in 2023, according to Amnesty International.

Official data on drug use in Saudi Arabia is scarce, but the health ministry last year estimated that there were more than 200,000 people whom they considered compulsive drug users among the kingdom’s 32mn population.

Researchers say the rising issue may be one of the unintended consequences of Prince Mohammed’s Vision 2030 programme, launched in 2016 with a view to modernising the kingdom.

Reforms have included removing restrictions on music concerts, leading to a rapid proliferation of entertainment options, and the rapid integration into public life of women who had previously been banned from driving and were often kept at home. Alcohol, however, remains strictly prohibited.

Alaa Nabil Mahsoon of King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, who published a study last year into drug use in Saudi Arabia, said that while major social changes had exposed young people to newfound freedom, it had also caused a counter-reaction from families seeking to restrict them — increasing conflict within households and the allure of drugs.

Mahsoon said that the most “surprising” finding from her research was that women tended to use drugs for a longer period of time than men.

“Women face significant societal pressures,” she said. “Progress has been made in expanding opportunities and freedoms for women, but challenges remain at the family level . . . Some families are slower to adapt to these changes, which can create tensions, especially for younger women.”

She said some women “don’t feel a sense of safety or fulfilment, maybe in their own homes. So whenever they find drugs, they stick to them.”

Johara, a 37-year-old female business consultant, thought of herself as a casual alcohol drinker and user of hashish, but realised she had a problem during the pandemic, when she caught herself using in between client calls.

“That’s when I knew that there was a really big issue,” said Johara, who asked that her real name not be used. She joined a Narcotics Anonymous group and eventually got sober, describing her addiction as a “disease”.

A wide range of substances is available in the kingdom. The doctor in the Eastern Province, for example, said he has noticed more consumption of hashish and crystal meth “because they are easy to consume and easy to hide”.

Of particular concern, however, is captagon, a synthetic stimulant produced in regime-held areas of Syria and distributed across the Middle East. Its proliferation helped prompt authorities to launch their “war on drugs” in 2022.

Caroline Rose, co-author of a report on captagon by the Washington-based New Lines Institute, said that though seizures of the drug had fallen over the past year — a potential sign that the crackdown is working — the cross-border criminal syndicates behind smuggling had responded with more sophisticated tactics.

“Saudi Arabia is the top demand and destination market . . . and so because of it, [traffickers] will be as creative as they can,” she said. “There’s still an active network operating inside of the kingdom that is allowing and is co-ordinating with these outside criminal networks, and essentially poking holes in Saudi maritime and overland border ports.”

Experts question, however, whether the restoration of drug-related executions, which reversed an earlier attempt to improve human rights in the kingdom under international pressure, can prove effective.

“There is no evidence showing that the use of the death penalty, even for the most serious crimes like murder, is deterrence,” said Dana Ahmed, researcher at Amnesty International, arguing that “the reversal . . . comes at a time when there’s zero scrutiny on Saudi Arabia”.

As well as ramping up harsh punishments, authorities have acknowledged the need to try to rehabilitate drug users. Saudi law does not prosecute those who voluntarily come to government hospitals for help, and the health ministry began licensing privately owned rehab centres for the first time in 2020.

“It is a new phenomenon but the demand [for treatment] is much higher than the supply,” said Khalid al-Mshari, chief executive of the kingdom’s first private rehab centre Qaweem.

He warned, however, that there would be no easy fixes. “People think: ‘our son went into rehab for a few days’ and that’s it,” Mshari said. “This is a chronic disease. You can contain it, but it is hard to cure.

“An addict can be sober for 10 or 15 years but . . . it would be very hard for them not to relapse.”

Data visualisation by Aditi Bhandari