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- Iran is believed to have weaponized pharmaceutical agents to kill or incapacitate.
- These chemical weapons affect a victim's central nervous system.
- These are especially a problem if Iran supplies them to militant allies like Hezbollah and Hamas.
Iran has developed chemical weapons based on synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, warns a US expert, powerful agents that could incapacitate soldiers or civilians when added to grenades or artillery.
Pharmaceutical-based agents, or PBAs, are essentially weaponized medicines that incapacitate or kill their victims depending on the exposure. Iran may have given PBAs to its proxies, such as Hezbollah, which could use them to kidnap Israeli troops and civilians.
"At a time of growing regional instability in the Middle East, largely the result of the militancy of Iranian proxies, the threats posed by Iran's weaponized PBA program can no longer be overlooked," Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute think tank, wrote in an article for the Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point.
The US Government Accountability Office defines PBAs as "chemicals based on pharmaceutical compounds, which may or may not have legitimate medical uses, and can cause severe illness or death when misused." They include opioids such as fentanyl and tranquilizers for animals.
These drugs affect a victim's central nervous system. "Once inhaled, these agents cause victims to lose full consciousness and enable the forces deploying them to advance quickly and quietly and/or take captive the unconscious victims," Levitt wrote.
Iran was a victim of chemical warfare during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. Though estimates vary, at least tens of thousands of Iranians were believed to be exposed to Iraqi chemical attacks — including mustard gas and nerve agents such as sarin. But Iran employed its own mustard gas on a few occasions during the war. Israel believes Iran used PBAs against rebels in the Syrian Civil War, while there are reports that pro-Iranian militias in Iraq may have unleashed them against anti-government protesters.
"The problem is that Iran is right when they said they've been victims of chemical weapons in terrible ways during the Iran-Iraq war," Levitt told Business Insider. "But the reality is they themselves have been using these as well."
The US and its allies have warned for years that Iran is developing pharmaceutical-based weapons in breach of the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, which bans the manufacture and use of "toxic chemicals." These are defined as chemicals that, through their "chemical action on life processes," can cause "death, temporary incapacitation or permanent harm to humans or animals." Treaty signatories — including Iran — are obligated to destroy existing stockpiles.
Still, evidence suggests Iran is pursuing PBAs. In 2014, the chemistry department of Iran's Imam Hossein University "sought kilogram quantities of medetomidine — a sedative it has researched as an aerosolized incapacitant — from Chinese exporters," a 2023 US State Department report said. "The Chemistry Department has little history of veterinary or even medical research, and the quantities sought (over 10,000 effective doses) were inconsistent with the reported end use of research."
In September 2023, Iranian anti-government hackers "posted confidential documents detailing an Iranian military university's development of grenades meant to disseminate medetomidine," the State Department said.
Of particular concern were references in Iranian literature to the 2002 Dubrovka incident, when Russian security forces pumped pharmaceutical-based gas — probably fentanyl or carfentanyl, another synthetic opioid vastly more potent — into a crowded Moscow theater to subdue Chechen rebels who'd taken almost a thousand hostages. Commandos then stormed the building and killed the incapacitated rebels — but the gas also killed more than 130 hostages.
Yet restricting 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 employed for riot control, but not as a battlefield weapon.
Stopping nations from manufacturing PBAs is " very, very difficult," Levitt said, which is why there's been "such a focus on diplomatic efforts, sanctions, and some law-enforcement actions."
Iranian PBAs are a particular problem if Tehran has supplied them to proxies such as Hezbollah. "Deploying weapons produced with dual-use items, and then providing said weapons to proxies, provides Iran with multiple layers of cover and reasonable deniability for having done so at all," Levitt wrote in his article.
Israel feared that Hezbollah would use PBA weapons as part of an alleged plan to seize the Galilee region of northern Israel and kidnap Israeli citizens. "Maybe you just use them to incapacitate the border guards and reach the now unprotected civilians," Levitt told BI. "Or, you actually target and incapacitate the soldiers so you can kidnap or capture them."
Israel's recent military offensives in Lebanon have badly hurt Hezbollah, including its huge arsenal of missiles. But PBAs can be added to hand grenades and mortar shells, of which Hezbollah still has ample stocks. And there remains a possibility that US forces could clash with Iran and its allies and encounter pharmaceutical-based agents. (The US, in contrast, completed the destruction of its chemical weapons in 2023.)
Levitt emphasizes, however, that PBAs aren't in the same league as weapons of mass destruction such as nerve gas, which is potent enough to kill widely across exposure areas. "This is not a strategic threat. It is a tactical weapon."
Nonetheless, chemical weapons do have a frightening aura, even if fentanyl gas is nowhere near as deadly as nerve gas. "I think that 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 holds an MA in political science from Rutgers University. Follow him on X and LinkedIn.
November 12, 2024: This story's headline was updated to reflect a measure of uncertainty surrounding Iran's development specifically of fentanyl-based agents rather than pharmaceutical-based agents more generally.