Dubai police seize over $1 billion of captagon drug smuggled inside furniture

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The United Arab Emirates foiled an attempt to smuggle 13 tonnes of the addictive amphetamine captagon – worth more than $1 billion – hidden in a shipment of doors and decorative building panels, the country’s Ministry of Interior said in a statement on Thursday.

The Dubai Police said it arrested six people who were part of an “international criminal cartel,” in what it said was “one of the largest smuggling operations of captagon tablets in the world.”

The pills were hidden using “innovative smuggling methods,” concealed within 432 pieces of high-end furniture panels and 651 professionally crafted doors made from iron and wood, the interior ministry said, adding that extracting the tablets took “days.”

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Captagon was originally the brand name for a medicinal product containing the synthetic stimulant fenethylline. Though it is no longer produced legally, counterfeit drugs carrying the captagon name are regularly seized in the Middle East, according to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction.

Experts say the vast majority of global captagon production occurs in Syria, with the Gulf region being its primary destination.

The growth of the industry has raised alarms in the international community. Last year, the US introduced the 2022 US Captagon Act, which linked the trade to the Syrian regime and called it a “transnational security threat.”

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