Captagon: the amphetamine fuelling Syria's civil war

As Syria sinks deeper into civil war, evidence is emerging that a brutal and bloody conflict that has left more than 100,000 people dead and displaced as many as two million is being fuelled by the export and consumption of rapidly increasing quantities of illegal drugs.

Separate investigations by the news agency Reuters and Time magazine have found that the growing trade in Syrian-made Captagon - an amphetamine widely consumed in the Middle East but almost unknown elsewhere - generated revenues of millions of dollars inside the country last year, some of which was almost certainly used to fund weapons, while combatants on both sides are reportedly turning to the stimulant to help them keep fighting.

According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Syria has long been a transit point for drugs coming from Europe, Turkey and Lebanon and destined for the wealthy Gulf states.

But the breakdown of law and order, collapse of the country's infrastructure and proliferation of armed groups have now turned it into a major producer, according to Reuters.

By contrast, production in Lebanon's Bekaa valley - a traditional centre for the drug - fell 90 per cent last year from 2011, with the decline largely attributed to production inside Syria.

Neither investigation found conclusive evidence that the warring sides were using profits from the drug directly to buy weapons, but both quoted experts and officials as saying this was likely.

A former US Treasury official, Matthew Levitt, pointed out that the Iranian-funded, Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah, which is robustly backing Syria's Assad regime, "has a long history of dabbling in the drug trade to help with funding".