Saudi Arabia smashed an attempt to smuggle over 8 million Captagon pills, which hid in onion and silicon barrels shipments. These are the pills used mainly to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and less commonly for depression.

The figure was executed at Jeddah Islamic Port on January 14 when the Saudi Customs Authority located 3,054,000of the Captagon pills amongst a consignment of onions and a further 5,281,250 in silicon casks.

However, three people were arrested for fear of being involved in the attempted smuggling operation and were detained by the General Directorate of Narcotics Control.

The smuggling of Captagon pills, a synthetic amphetamine widely circulated and consumed throughout the Middle East as banned drugs, have increasingly come to light following a series of massive seizures over the past few years.

Consequential smuggling operations were blocked, totalling 33 million pills captured by Greece in 2019 and another shipment of over 44 million pills caught by Saudi authorities in April 2020.

After a month, Italian authorities seized the largest shipment ever in history, numbering over 84 million pills.

Such operations were began suspected of being carried out by the terror group Daesh. Meanwhile, the Syrian administration of Bashar Al-Assad was cultivating and smuggling the drugs to bypass international sanctions imposed on it due to its war crimes in the ongoing Syrian conflict.

According to the Saudi Arabia government, they seized 600 million pills in the past few years. They implemented a ban on importing fruits and vegetables from Lebanon, which the smugglers use as a hub of smuggling operations.