In a purported soap factory on the outskirts of Damascus, rebel fighters surging forward to oust President Bashar al-Assad earlier this month uncovered the regime's worst-kept secret, said The Guardian: "millions of Captagon pills and industrial quantities of precursor chemicals." The discovery backed neighboring states' claims that Assad's Syria harbored the "world’s largest Captagon production and export operation." 

What's Captagon? 
The drug is a brand name for fenethylline, an amphetamine-type stimulant first produced in the 1960s that's used to treat conditions including narcolepsy and ADHD. But Captagon has also become a name for any pill that has an "amphetamine-type boost," said The New Yorker. Often referred to as "chemical courage," it has reportedly been used by soldiers in war-torn areas to give them "focus and energy," said drugs researcher Nicole Lee at The Conversation. 

The drug was banned in much of the world in the mid-1980s, but by the early 2000s, the Middle East had become a center of illicit Captagon production and distribution. In Syria, pills produced and distributed by drug lords sold for "anything from $2 to $20 each", said Sky News. 

How big was Assad's operation? 
The Assad regime "denied until its last day" that it was behind Syria's vast Captagon empire, said The Guardian. Profits from the Captagon trade for "actors in Syria and Lebanon" reached $2.4 billion a year between 2020 and 2022, said a report by the Observatory of Political and Economic Networks. 

What will happen to the market? 
The fall of Assad will have knock-on effects for other players involved in the Captagon trade. Hezbollah will feel a "strain" on its resources, after years of profiting from trafficking the drug, said The Wall Street Journal. 

Yet the "appetite" for Captagon remains strong, said Al Jazeera, and the trade is likely to "shift" to other regions. Other drugs are also in plentiful supply, including methamphetamine, a "great deal of which reportedly already comes from Iran and Afghanistan," and operators in both of these countries may now pick up on the stalled Captagon trade too.

That pink-and-green movie about two witches subsumed social media and the box office during the last weeks of 2024. So much so it could be easy to forget that "Wicked" is, in many ways, the apotheosis of a year in which the movie musical genre returned from the grave.

The 'is it' or 'isn't it' quandary
Early in 2024, the movie version of the musical adaptation of Tina Fey's "Mean Girls" was released. It was both loved and loathed, and much discussion was had about the studio's marketing of the film, in which the trailers gave no indication it was a musical. That was despite recent box-office triumphs of movie musicals. 

"Despite the success of movies such as 'Wonka' and 'The Greatest Showman,' studios seemed nervous to advertise the musical elements of their song-and-dance extravaganzas," said Ryan Faughnder at the Los Angeles Times. As 2024 ticked on, the 'is it' or 'isn't it' musical releases swelled: "Joker 2: Folie à Deux"; the Timothée Chalamet-led Bob Dylan biopic, "A Complete Unknown"; the drug cartel caper "Emilia Pérez." But by year's end, "Moana 2," the "Lion King" prequel "Mufasa" and "Wicked" all showed their hand, not pretending one bit they were anything but musicals.

Why song-and-dance right now?
Production on movies begins long before a film's release. Still, movies resonate with the time of their birth into the cinematic world, whether the artists aim them to or not. 

During a fraught economic and political present, when it "seems like we have been fractured beyond repair," the musical can bring a "utopian message of hope and resilience," said Desirée J. Garcia, the author of "The Movie Musical," to the Los Angeles Times. The genre lends itself to finales of "coming together" and surmounting "division and conflict."

Many of the movie musicals of 2024 are intricate. They embrace darkness, as those of Old Hollywood did not. The "stars of this new cycle" deserve praise because their characters are "vastly more complex (and confused) than those of the old musicals," said Peter Bart at Deadline. "Gene Kelly in 'Singing in the Rain' and Fred Astaire in 'Top Hat' were essentially airheads."

Film trends can evaporate as quickly as they appear, so the movie musical boom could soon disintegrate but not next year. Come November, the second installment of "Wicked" will be released, another likely box-office victory.