TEHRAN - Two consignments of drugs were seized by police in two separate operations, a spokesman for the Islamic Republic of Iran Customs Administration (IRICA) said on Saturday.

The spokesman said that the Tehran customs police discovered one consignment, which included 41 kilograms of opium. He said the drug was destined for Germany.

"In the meantime, the police seized 4,476 grams of crystal in the Special Economic Zone of Dogharoon in Khorasan Razavi province," he went on to say.

The amount of methamphetamine trafficked from Afghanistan to Iran has reached 10 tons in the first 10 months of the current year (March 21, 2019- Jan. 21, 2020) which shows a ten-fold increase in comparison with the corresponding period last year, the spokesman explained.

Iran is at the forefront of the fight against drug trafficking. The drugs are mainly destined to lucrative markets in Europe and Persian Gulf Arab states.

The drugs originate from neighboring Afghanistan.

John F. Sopko, U.S. special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, said at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC, in November 2019 that the counternarcotics effort in Afghanistan "has just been a total failure", the Business Insider said on December 5.

Opium cultivation covered 263,000 hectares in Afghanistan, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. That was down from 328,000 hectares in 2017 but still more than any other year since 1994.