While the Iran-backed terrorist group Hizballah has long been involved in the South American cocaine trade—an important source of its revenue—it has in recent years also been exporting a stimulant called Captagon. Much of its supply is coming from nearby Syria, where the Hizballah-allied regime has turned to drug production to fund its efforts to win the ongoing civil war. Matthew Zweig explains:

Captagon is a brand name for a dangerous, addictive amphetamine-type drug that includes fenethylline hydrochloride. . . . This turn to the drug trade signals a new phase in the Syrian conflict: the emergence of Syria as a narco-state. . . The Captagon drug trade not only facilitates Assad’s atrocities against the Syrian people, but could also create further instability through the widespread proliferation of amphetamine usage in the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond.

Conflict, destruction, and territorial fragmentation are key factors allowing armed groups and narco-entrepreneurs to profit from the drug trade. Large-scale narcotics production and trafficking by rogue regimes or in ungoverned or under-governed spaces often sows further regional instability, leading to higher criminality and public health problems in consumer and producer countries. This pattern is now taking hold in Libya, where there is a burgeoning Captagon trade with reported Syrian links.

Furthermore, narcotics markets are not static. Today’s Captagon amphetamine markets could easily transform into far more potent methamphetamine markets, which happened in Afghanistan. The political wars of today’s Middle East risk becoming the lethal narco-wars of tomorrow.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.