In Iran, drug trafficking soars as sanctions take bigger bite TURKAN, Azerbaijan - Even as Western sanctions ravage their economy, some Iranians are reaping a cash harvest from an unexpected source: a booming illicit drug industry that law enforcement officials say is producing record quantities of a powerful synthetic drug. The surge in drug trafficking from a country with one of the world's highest rates of opium addiction has alarmed police and intelligence officials from Europe to Southeast Asia, where authorities say they are witnessing a flood of high-quality methamphetamine of Iranian origin. Iranian police officers stand behind narcotic drugs which were seized at border of Iran and Afghanistan, a known drug trafficking route, at the Milak border in southeastern Iran on Oct. 10, 2012. WorldViews Max Fisher The prototype J-31 could be a big step forward for Chinese military technology. Olga Khazan The move could boost support for President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, who polls well among younger voters. New rules are already in effect in Beijing, and some of them are a bit silly. Anne Gearan On world tour, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton uses America's vicious campaigns as a teachable moment. Drug-related violence has spilled into the Caucasus. Regional officials say heavily armed drug gangs wage pitched battles with police and border guards, sometimes using weapons and military hardware taken from battlefields in Afghanistan and Iran. In Azerbaijan, Iran's northern neighbor, naval patrols in the Caspian Sea are playing cat-and-mouse with Iranian smugglers who use modified speedboats. On land, captured Iranians have been found carrying U.S.-made night-vision goggles, and some have used bombs and armored vehicles to smash through checkpoints, Western and Middle Eastern officials say. Iran has acknowledged that the country faces a serious drug problem. Its officials point to slayings of hundreds of police and border guards as evidence that Iran is a victim of increasingly violent criminal networks. Iranian officials enacted tougher drug laws last year as part of a crackdown that also led to the confiscation of more than three tons of methamphetamine and the execution of dozens of suspected drug dealers. "Meth and heroin dealers are now treated the same," Iranian police commander Brig. Gen. Esmaeil Mogaddam assured a gathering of drug-enforcement officials from 11 countries who met at an Interpol conference earlier this year in Tehran. But U.S. and Middle Eastern intelligence officials say Iran has paid far less attention to the flow of drugs heading out of the country than into it, often failing to cooperate with overseas counterparts attempting to track the flow of drugs. "Iran is a black hole," said a senior U.S. law enforcement official familiar with drug trafficking in the region. At least some of the overseas routes are protected by Iran's Quds Force, an elite unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps with a long history of smuggling contraband, according to U.S. officials, several of whom insisted on anonymity in discussing confidential assessments of Iran's drug trade. The Quds Force is closely allied with Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based militant group with deep ties to drug trafficking around the world, including Latin America. "Both of these organizations are now heavily involved in the global drug trade," Michael Braun, the former operations chief for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, said at a congressional hearing in February. Their participation in that effort presents them with myriad opportunities with which to build their terrorist and criminal capacity in the Western Hemisphere and elsewhere.