On this date in 2014, Saudi Arabia beheaded Ismail Khan Sayed for smuggling “a large amount” of heroin into the kingdom.

Despite (or because of) its strict sharia mores, Saudi Arabia has developed a national appetite for mind-altering substances. It’s an epidemic that the kingdom’s busy headsmen have been detailed to address on the supply side, although of course the treatment for foreign gofers like Sayed differs markedly from that of the many drug-addled royals who enjoy the product.

“Most of our shit originates in Afghanistan,” a Saudi drug dealer told Vice in 2013. “It’s a long chain of selling that starts with nomads in Afghani fields. They grow it, then it gets hidden between crates away from the mutawa [the religious police -ed.] and goes from seller to seller like a spider web.”

For hashish as well as heroin sourced to Afghanistan, Pakistani couriers play an essential role in that web — even if they are eminently disposable individually. They have had a growing prominence in Saudi Arabia’s frequent execution bulletins: Sayed was the 12th Pakistani drug mule executed in Saudi Arabia in a two-month span at the end of 2014; there have been (and continue to be) many more since.

On this day..

• 1943: Four Aussie escapees, at the Hotel Tacloban
• 1973: Five for an Afghanistan coup
• 820: Not Michael the Amorian, conquer or die
• 1553: Pedro de Valdivia, founder of Santiago
• 1204: Alexios V, precipitated Byzantine emperor
• 2010: An Iranian crack trafficker
• 1017: Eadric Streona, traitorous
• Feast Day of St. Anastasia
• 317 B.C.E.: Philip III Arrhidaeus, who succeeded Alexander the Great
• 1683: Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha, for the Battle of Vienna
• 2006: Three old men and a taxi driver
• 1989: Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu