Iraqi forces arrest drug dealer, seize million captagon pills

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Iraqi police forces in western Anbar province on Sunday arrested a drug dealer who was in possession of a million captagon pills, Iraqi state media reported.

“Anbar police arrested a drug dealer who was in possession of a million Lexus pills,” Hadi Razij Kassar, head of the province’s police force said. 

The term Lexus is often used for captagon pills that have higher quality and purity.

Containing an amphetamine-type stimulant, captagon was the name of a trade drug patented in Germany in the early 1960s. It was used to treat attention deficit, narcolepsy, and other conditions before it was banned. 

Following 2011 and the Syrian civil war, the illicit captagon pills started spreading in several countries across the Middle East, with the main supplier being the war-torn Syria itself.

According to AFP, while Syria is the Middle East’s main producer of captagon, the main consumer in the region is Iraq’s southern neighbor Saudi Arabia. 

Syria has effectively been turned into a narco-state, concluded an investigation by the New York Times in 2021 revealing that more than 250 million captagon pills were seized around the world that year.

Officials have scrutinized the Syrian government, claiming their major involvement in the drug trade.

Iraqi security forces in late April said they had broken up a drug trafficking ring and seized over six million pills of the amphetamine-type stimulant captagon.

According to research by the New Lines Institute released in April, the captagon trade in the Middle East topped $5 billion in 2021, an increase from $3.5 billion in 2020. 

The General Directorate of Narcotics Control in the Ministry of Interior in June confirmed that it had arrested more than 20,000 drug users and seized millions of narcotic pills and more than 500,000 kilos of psychotropic substances during the last two years and a half.