The masked official on the port of Jeddah takes a blade to the plasterboard, revealing thousands and thousands of sandy-coloured amphetamine capsules stuffed inside a cargo of development materials.
At a crossing with Jordan, border guards seize greater than 300,000 tablets of the stimulant captagon hidden within the gasoline tanks and spare tire compartments of vehicles. In south-western Najran, authorities execute six individuals for making an attempt to smuggle cannabis and amphetamine.
The incidents, all from this month, are amongst a stream of near-daily updates from Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Inside, a part of a sweeping and brutal marketing campaign it has described as a “struggle on medicine” launched to fight the escalating disaster.
Saudi Arabia has lengthy been a main goal for drug smugglers within the area in search of to use its lengthy desert borders with international locations together with Jordan and Yemen to entry what they see as a significant client market.
Saudi medical doctors and researchers say drug use is rising. That is partly fuelled by the proliferation of medicine like captagon, but additionally partly, they are saying, by social dislocation ensuing from fast top-down social and financial adjustments carried out beneath Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman which have left some in Saudi society extra susceptible than earlier than.
“To be sincere, it’s a rising drawback,” mentioned a physician who works with dependancy sufferers within the kingdom’s Japanese Province. “Drug use is rising.”
Official alarm over drug abuse has sparked a dramatic change in techniques, starting from new guidelines permitting personal rehabilitation centres for the primary time, to the top of a moratorium on executions for drug crimes, reinstating one of many world’s harshest punishment regimes.
The dominion has carried out almost 100 executions for drug-related crimes to date this yr, up from simply two in 2023, in accordance with Amnesty Worldwide.
Official knowledge on drug use in Saudi Arabia is scarce, however the well being ministry final yr estimated that there have been greater than 200,000 individuals whom they thought-about compulsive drug customers among the many kingdom’s 32mn inhabitants.
Researchers say the rising concern could also be one of many unintended penalties of Prince Mohammed’s Imaginative and prescient 2030 programme, launched in 2016 with a view to modernising the dominion.
Reforms have included eradicating restrictions on music concert events, resulting in a fast proliferation of leisure choices, and the fast integration into public life of girls who had beforehand been banned from driving and have been usually stored at dwelling. Alcohol, nevertheless, stays strictly prohibited.
Alaa Nabil Mahsoon of King Abdulaziz College in Jeddah, who printed a examine final yr into drug use in Saudi Arabia, mentioned that whereas main social adjustments had uncovered younger individuals to newfound freedom, it had additionally induced a counter-reaction from households in search of to limit them — rising battle inside households and the attract of medicine.
Mahsoon mentioned that essentially the most “shocking” discovering from her analysis was that ladies tended to make use of medicine for an extended time frame than males.
“Girls face vital societal pressures,” she mentioned. “Progress has been made in increasing alternatives and freedoms for girls, however challenges stay on the household degree . . . Some households are slower to adapt to those adjustments, which may create tensions, particularly for younger ladies.”
She mentioned some ladies “don’t really feel a way of security or fulfilment, perhaps in their very own properties. So at any time when they discover medicine, they stick with them.”
Johara, a 37-year-old feminine enterprise advisor, considered herself as an informal alcohol drinker and person of cannabis, however realised she had an issue throughout the pandemic, when she caught herself utilizing in between shopper calls.
“That’s after I knew that there was a extremely huge concern,” mentioned Johara, who requested that her actual identify not be used. She joined a Narcotics Nameless group and ultimately acquired sober, describing her dependancy as a “illness”.
A variety of drugs is obtainable within the kingdom. The physician within the Japanese Province, for instance, mentioned he has observed extra consumption of cannabis and crystal meth “as a result of they’re straightforward to eat and straightforward to cover”.
Of explicit concern, nevertheless, is captagon, an artificial stimulant produced in regime-held areas of Syria and distributed throughout the Center East. Its proliferation helped immediate authorities to launch their “struggle on medicine” in 2022.
Caroline Rose, co-author of a report on captagon by the Washington-based New Strains Institute, mentioned that although seizures of the drug had fallen over the previous yr — a possible signal that the crackdown is working — the cross-border prison syndicates behind smuggling had responded with extra subtle techniques.
“Saudi Arabia is the highest demand and vacation spot market . . . and so due to it, [traffickers] shall be as artistic as they’ll,” she mentioned. “There’s nonetheless an lively community working inside the dominion that’s permitting and is co-ordinating with these exterior prison networks, and primarily poking holes in Saudi maritime and overland border ports.”
Specialists query, nevertheless, whether or not the restoration of drug-related executions, which reversed an earlier try to enhance human rights within the kingdom beneath worldwide strain, can show efficient.
“There isn’t any proof displaying that using the loss of life penalty, even for essentially the most critical crimes like homicide, is deterrence,” mentioned Dana Ahmed, researcher at Amnesty Worldwide, arguing that “the reversal . . . comes at a time when there’s zero scrutiny on Saudi Arabia”.
In addition to ramping up harsh punishments, authorities have acknowledged the necessity to attempt to rehabilitate drug customers. Saudi regulation doesn’t prosecute those that voluntarily come to authorities hospitals for assist, and the well being ministry started licensing privately owned rehab centres for the primary time in 2020.
“It’s a new phenomenon however the demand [for treatment] is way increased than the availability,” mentioned Khalid al-Mshari, chief government of the dominion’s first personal rehab centre Qaweem.
He warned, nevertheless, that there could be no straightforward fixes. “Folks suppose: ‘our son went into rehab for a number of days’ and that’s it,” Mshari mentioned. “This can be a persistent illness. You may comprise it, however it’s laborious to treatment.
“An addict will be sober for 10 or 15 years however . . . it will be very laborious for them to not relapse.”
Information visualisation by Aditi Bhandari
