BEIRUT, (Reuters) – Lebanon’s security forces have seized an estimated 10 million captagon pills that were to be smuggled to Senegal and then on to Saudi Arabia, Interior Minister Bassam Mawlawi said in a tweet on Friday. The drugs were found in a shipment of rubber carbon during an operation in which four people were arrested in the Al-Qubbah area, in northern Lebanon, Mawlawi said. Captagon – a mix of amphetamines also known as the “poor man’s cocaine” – is one of the more popular recreational drugs among the youth in the Middle East. Large quantities are produced in Syria and smuggled through neighboring Lebanon and Jordan to the Gulf, according to security officials in those countries.

In 2021, Saudi Arabia put in place an import ban on Lebanese products over drug smuggling. Last month, the United States Treasury sanctioned two Lebanese nationals accused of involvement in the trafficking of captagon from Syria. Reporting by Maya Gebeily, Writing by Jana Choukeir; Editing by Jon Boyle Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.