- Iran is believed to have weaponized pharmaceutical agents to kill or incapacitate.
- These chemical weapons affect the victim’s central nervous system.
- These are especially a problem if Iran supplies them to militant allies such as Hezbollah and Hamas.
Iran has developed chemical weapons based on synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, a US expert warns, powerful agents that can incapacitate soldiers or civilians when added to grenades or artillery.
Pharmaceutical-based agents, or PBAs, are essentially weaponized drugs that incapacitate or kill their victims depending on exposure. Iran may have provided PBAs to its proxies such as Hezbollah, who could use them to kidnap Israeli troops and civilians.
“At a time of growing regional instability in the Middle East, largely the result of militancy by Iranian proxies, the threats posed by Iran’s PBA weapons program can no longer be ignored,” wrote Matthew Levitt in an article for the Center for Combat Terrorism in West Point.
The US Government Accountability Office defines PBAs as “chemicals based on pharmaceutical compounds that may or may not have legitimate medical uses and can cause serious illness or death when misused.” They include opioids such as fentanyl and animal tranquilizers.
These drugs affect the victim’s central nervous system. “Once inhaled, these agents render victims completely unconscious and enable deploying forces to advance quickly and silently and/or capture unconscious victims,” Levitt wrote.
Iran was a victim of chemical warfare during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, when Iraqi chemical attacks – including nerve gases such as Sarin and mustard gas – contributed to an estimated 1 million Iranian casualties. But Iran used its own mustard gas on several occasions during the war. Israel believes that Iran used PBAs against rebels in the Syrian Civil War, while there are reports that pro-Iranian militias in Iraq may have fired them against anti-government protesters.
“The problem is that Iran is right to say that they have been victims of chemical weapons in horrific ways during the Iran-Iraq war,” Levitt, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute, told Business Insider. “But the reality is that they themselves have used these as well.”
The US and its allies have warned for years that Iran is developing pharmaceutical-based weapons in violation of the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, which bans the production and use of “toxic chemicals”, defined as “chemical action on life processes “. [that] may cause death, temporary disability, or permanent injury to humans or animals.” Signatories to the treaty — including Iran — are obligated to destroy existing stockpiles.
However, evidence suggests that Iran is pursuing PBAs. “In 2014, Iran’s Department of Chemistry of IHU [Imam Hossein University] They requested a quantity of kilograms of medetomidine – a [veterinary] tranquilizer has been researched as an aerosolized incapacitant—by Chinese exporters, according to a 2023 US State Department report. “The Department of Chemistry has little history of veterinary or even medical research, and the quantities requested (over 10,000 effective doses) do not were consistent with the reported end use of the research.”
In September 2023, Iranian anti-government hackers “posted confidential documents detailing an Iranian military university’s development of grenades intended to distribute medetomidine,” the State Department said.
Of particular concern were references in Iranian literature to the 2002 Dubrovka incident, when Russian security forces pumped a pharmaceutical-based gas — possibly fentanyl or carfentanil, another much more potent synthetic opioid — into a crowded theater in Moscow. to subdue Chechen rebels who had taken almost a thousand hostages. The commandos then stormed the building and killed the incapacitated rebels – but the gas also killed more than 130 hostages.
However, limiting PBAs is difficult because they overlap with products used for legitimate law enforcement and medical purposes. For example, tear gas has been used by law enforcement as a riot control agent since World War I, while US troops used it in the Vietnam War to smoke out enemy tunnels. Tear gas is still legal when used for riot control, but not as a battlefield weapon.
Stopping nations from producing PBAs is “very, very difficult, which is why you’ve seen such a focus on diplomatic efforts, sanctions and some law enforcement actions,” Levitt said.
Iranian PBAs are a particular problem if Tehran has supplied them with proxies such as Hezbollah. “Distributing weapons manufactured with dual-use items, and then providing said weapons to proxies, provides Iran with multiple layers of cover and reasonable deniability for doing so at all,” the CTC article noted.
Israel feared that Hezbollah would use PBA weapons as part of an alleged plan to capture the Galilee region of northern Israel and kidnap Israeli citizens. “Maybe you just use them to incapacitate the border guards and get to the now-vulnerable civilians,” Levitt said. “Or, you actually target and disable soldiers in order to kidnap or capture them.”
Israel’s recent military offensives in Lebanon have severely damaged Hezbollah, including its large arsenal of missiles. But PBAs can be added to hand grenades and mortar shells, of which Hezbollah still has ample supplies. And there is the possibility that US forces could run into Iran and its allies and run into pharmaceutical-based agents. (The US, by contrast, completed the destruction of its chemical weapons by 2023.)
However, Levitt points out that WMDs are not in the same league as weapons of mass destruction like nerve gas, which is powerful enough to kill widely in exposure areas. “This is not a strategic threat. It is a tactical weapon.”
However, chemical weapons have an air of fear, even if fentanyl gas is not as deadly as nerve gas. “I think many, many people would see it that way because you’re talking about chemical weapons,” Levitt said.
Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He has a master’s degree in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him Twitter AND LinkedIn.