The market value of these 13 tons of pills is around $1 billion, according to Dubai authorities.
One of the “largest Captagon seizures in world history.” Dubai Police did not skimp on superlatives when they announced the discovery late this week of 13 tons of the highly addictive amphetamine, once dubbed a “jihadist drug.” The market value of this huge stash of pills is around $1 billion, according to the UAE Interior Ministry. According to CNN, six people were arrested on suspicion of being part of an “international cartel.”
The pills were hidden in panels used to make luxury furniture and in metal and wooden doors. The extraction of the drugs from these very sophisticated hiding places took “whole days,” according to the press release from the ministry, which is foaming at the mouth.
The Emirates promise to be “an impregnable fortress in the face of any danger that threatens the security and well-being of Emirati society,” Interior Minister Sheikh Saif bin Zayed Al Nahyan said in the statement he posted on X (formerly Twitter) on Thursday. Since 2019, UAE authorities have seized hundreds of thousands of Captagon pills. This year alone there were 175,000 in the first five months.
Fenetylline, also called amphetaminotheophylline, is sold throughout the Middle East and beyond and comes primarily from Syria. In fact, Syrian and Lebanese soldiers and militiamen from all sides are regular users, but far from the only ones, of the narcotic, also known as the “jihad pill” because of its violence-promoting properties. “We know that the Islamic State finances its own terrorist activities, in particular through the trafficking of synthetic drugs,” Italian authorities said during a major seizure in July 2020.
In 2022, the United States passed a policy, the Captagon Act, in which the Biden administration linked the Syrian regime and trafficking in this drug, calling it a “transnational threat.”