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Pharma-terrorism: Captagon at Times of Crisis, Civil Conflicts, and Terrorism [4th International Conference on Novel Psychoactive Substances, Hungary].
Abstract
Background: Fenethylline, a psychostimulant drug, often branded as Captagon, is a combination of amphetamine and theophylline. Since the cessation of its legal production in 1986, counterfeited products have been produced illicitly in south-east Europe and far-east Asia. Its profitable trade has been linked to terrorist organizations, including the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. This study aims to reach up-to-date data, concerning the Captagon e-commerce and use in the Middle East. Methods: A multi-staged and multi-lingual literature search was carried out. A list of prespecified keywords was applied across medical and paramedical databases, web and Dark web, search engines, social communication media, electronic commerce websites, media networks, and the Global Public Health Intelligence Network database. Results: The use of Captagon as a stimulant in terrorist settings has been marginally covered in the literature. Data can widely be retrieved from Google and AOL search engines, YouTube, and Amazon e-commerce websites, and to a lesser extent from Alibaba and eBay. On the contrary, Middle Eastern e-commerce websites yielded almost no results. Interestingly, the Dark web generated original data for Captagon e-commerce in the Middle East. Conclusion: Further investigations are needed on the role that psychoactive drugs play in terrorist attacks and civil war zones. Unless a comprehensive methodological strategy, inclusive of unconventional methods of research, is implemented, it will not be feasible to face such a threat to humanity.
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To determine the feasibility and utility of using media reports and other open-source information collected by the Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN), an event-based surveillance system operated by the Public Health Agency of Canada, to rapidly detect clusters of adverse drug events associated with 'novel psychoactive substances' (NPS) at the international level.
Researchers searched English media reports collected by the GPHIN between 1997 and 2013 for references to synthetic cannabinoids. They screened the resulting reports for relevance and content (i.e., reports of morbidity and arrest), plotted and compared with other available indicators (e.g., US poison control center exposures). The pattern of results from the analysis of GPHIN reports resembled the pattern seen from the other indicators.
The results of this study indicate that using media and other open-source information can help monitor the presence, usage, local policy, law enforcement responses, and spread of NPS in a rapid effective way. Further, modifying GPHIN to actively track NPS would be relatively inexpensive to implement and would be highly complementary to current national and international monitoring efforts. © 2015 The Authors. Human Psychopharmacology: Clinical and Experimental published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
© 2015 The Authors. Human Psychopharmacology published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Amphetamine-type stimulant (ATS);Captagon;fenethylline;Middle East;Syria;conflict
The terms Deep Web, Deep Net, Invisible Web, or Dark Web refer to the content on the World Wide Web that is not indexed by standard search engines. One can describe the Internet as composed of layers: the “upper” layer, or the Surface Web, can easily be accessed by regular searches. However, “deeper” layers, the content of the Deep Web, have not been indexed by traditional search engines such as Google. Michael K. Bergman who wrote the seminal paper on the Deep Web, compared searching the Internet to dragging a net across the surface of the ocean: a great deal may be caught in the net, but there is a wealth of information that is deeper and therefore missed. In fact, most of the Web's information is buried far down on sites, and standard search engines are unable to access it.
Khat (Catha edulis Forsk) is a shrub native to the Horn of Africa and the Middle East. The leaves of this small tree are chewed by millions worldwide as a mild, amphetamine-like psychostimulant drug. Whilst khat has enjoyed grey-area legality in many countries including the United Kingdom that otherwise prohibit the use of recreational drugs, recent years have seen the appearance of new legislation to control its production, importation and consumption. This mini-review will consolidate what is known about the pharmacology, chemistry, and effects on health of khat to provide a brief synopsis of the properties of this plant stimulant.
“Think globally, act locally” is considered critical to winning consumer trust in Ecommerce. However, there is a paucity of research aimed at understanding the linguistic adaptation required for Ecommerce. Researchers claim that Arabs have an affinity for high context but low content. Our pilot study of 50 prominent Ecommerce websites of businesses based in Arab countries has revealed that the majority of sites which offer an Arabic version are literal translations that fail to capture the real meaning or richness of the Arabic language. Further, the sites studied do not significantly reflect characteristics pertaining to a higher context culture and the site designs do not demonstrate conformance to Arab cultural dimensions identified in Hofstede's model. In this extended research, we present the methodology and results from a study of 500 Arabic E-Commerce sites spanning 22 Arab countries. Our initial focus was an investigation of the use of visual metaphors and their cultural undertones. In addition to the further validation of the results of the pilot study supporting non-conformance to Hofstede's model of cultural adaptation, our study determined very low adaptation of visual metaphors that were designed to reflect the Arab culture. Since language and culture are closely related, studying metaphor usage in particular and figurative language in general, received our attention in the second part of our study. We are currently developing an Arabic language e-commerce corpus by crawling a seed repository of web sites from 22 Arabic countries; this corpus includes a set of seven domains (business types). We believe the resulting corpus will serve as a valuable resource in order to accomplish different studies in computational linguistics and language engineering experiments. Our preliminary study of the acquired data shows that figurative language use, although sparse in general, is more common in tourism domain than e-banking domain. On the other hand, we observe that selecting web sites from different Arab countries facilitates the understanding of the use of Arabic dialects in different countries. Based on our preliminary analysis of data, we find the pervasive use of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), although some sparse use of dialectal features can be observed in the data-set. Our long term goal is to conduct eye-tracking studies and based on the insights gained from the prior studies, develop and communicate best practices for design firms and Arabic language translators, besides creating a repository of design and content patterns for Arabic Ecommerce websites. The ultimate objective of the research is to reduce the perceived digital gap in the Arab world and help achieve Qatar's vision of creating a knowledge-based economy and promote Arabic language in e-commerce.
This work was made possible by NPRP grant 5-1393-6-044 from the Qatar National Research Fund (A member of the Qatar Foundation).The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors.
The war in Syria and the drug bomb, by Dr. Ghassan Shahrour, MD.
After the escalation of the brutal war, how did the new drug abuse profile in Syria impact the main international and regional drug reports in 2013?
The brutal armed conflict in Syria has led to insecurity, displacement of millions, terrible poverty, millions of unemployed youth facing the worst crisis, increasing smuggling of weapons and drugs, coupled with growing challenges in running anti-narcotics programs.
The deductive methodology was used in reviewing the catastrophic situation, frequent media reports about smuggling of narcotics as well as the recent reports of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) on the spread of drug abuse.
It was found that UNODC reports have not reflected the growing drug crisis. No tangible contingency plan was made.
The conflict in Syria has ignited growing drug crisis affecting the people in Syria and the region. Urgent and comprehensive actions at all levels are needed to tackle it.
Fenetylline (CAPTAGON) is included in a list of compounds to be considered by a World Health Organization (WHO) Expert Committee in April 1985 for possible international scheduling under the Convention on Psychotropic Substances, 1971. For over 23 years, this central stimulant has been used therapeutically in hyperkinetic children and other indications in place of amphetamines and other central stimulants with higher risk levels. In good correspondence with recent animal data fenetylline also shows significant qualitative and quantitative differences compared to amphetamine in man. It has few adverse side effects, a lower abuse potential and little actual abuse compared to amphetamine. Thus its benefit/risk assessment is substantially more favourable than that of other central stimulants. For proper therapeutic use of the substance, prescription status is or should be required by national authorities.
The incorporation tendency of fenethylline (FNT) and its metabolite into rat hair and the discrimination between FNT use and amphetamine (AP) use by hair analysis using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry with selected ion monitoring are described. After the intraperitoneal administrations of FNT to pigmented hairy rats (5 mg/kg/day, 10 days, n = 3), concentrations of FNT and its metabolite, AP, in the rat hair newly grown over 4 weeks were compared with area under the concentration versus time curves (AUCs) of the drugs in the rat plasma. The hair concentrations of FNT and AP were 52 +/- 1.4 and 4.9 +/- 0.6 ng/mg, whereas those of plasma AUCs were 55.9 +/- 23.1 and 22.3 +/- 4.9 micrograms.min/mL, respectively. The ratios of the hair concentrations to the AUCs of FNT tends to be highly incorporated into hair from suggests that FNT tends to be highly incorporated into hair from blood. The analytical method was applied to the determination of the metabolites in scalp hair of humans who were given FNT orally in multiple doses (50 mg/day, 3 days, n = 5) or in a single dose (50 mg/day, 1 day, n = 1). FNT and AP were detected at 0.51 +/- 0.23 and 0.35 +/- 0.12 ng/mg, respectively, in the proximal 1-cm hair segments from subjects given FNT orally for 3 days and 0.25 and 0.11 ng/mg, respectively, in the single-dose sample. In addition, it was found that the concentrations of FNT were 1.2 to 2.7 times greater than those of AP in the human hair samples, except for one sample, although FNT rapidly disappeared from the urine compared with AP. It was concluded that hair would be a good specimen for disclosure of drug history of FNT and for discrimination between FNT use and AP abuse.