Bouterse and his family involvement in drug trafficking. Bouterse was sentenced in absentia in the Netherlands to 11 years' imprisonment after being convicted of trafficking of cocaine. His son Dino Bouterse has been arrested twice in three different countries and currently serving 16 years imprisonment in the United States on charge of drug trafficking. Syria Syria is home to a burgeoning and historyillegal drugs industry run by associates and relatives of the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad. The industry is run by a clandestine network of warlords, drug cartels, crime families and business men loyal to the Assad dynasty, operating across the regions of Syria and Lebanon. It mainly produces captagon, an addictive amphetamine popular in the Arab world. Another major drug which is manufactured and smuggled globally is hashish. As of 2021, the export of illegal drugs eclipsed the country's legal exports, leading the New York Times to call Syria "the world’s newest narcostate". The drug exports allow the Syrian government to generate hard currency, pay daily wages for deteriorating state army, finance private militias and hire mercenaries. Centre of Operational Analysis and Research reported in 2021 that Assad regime has turned Syria into "the global epicentre of Captagon production, which is now more industrialised, adaptive, and technically sophisticated than ever." During its occupation of Lebanon during 1976–2005, Assad regime used its proxies in Lebanon for establishing its multi-billion dollar drug industry. Syria was labeled as a narco-state by the United States for nearly a decade until 1997. Throughout the Syrian occupation of Lebanon when they controlled the cannabis cultivation in the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon, Assad regime was the Middle East region's main source of hashish. During the Syrian Civil War, Assad regime began mass production of drugs within Syria, and officers fed their men fenethylline, which they called "Captain Courage." Several shipments containing tonnes of amphetamines were seized in different countries smuggled from Syria, those shipments had sometimes millions of pills of fenethylline, which production in the country started since at least 2006. After 2013, captogen production and export in Syria skyrocketed, with the direct support of the Assad regime; and its multi-billion dollar profits exceeded the total GDP. By 2020, Syria had become the world's biggest centre of captogen production, sales and exports. One of the largest drug seizures occurred in Palermo port in July 2020, when the Italian police busted more than 84 million Captogen tablets