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Al-Monitor – Amid a host of pressing economic grievances, flaring tensions with the West and Israel and a nuclear deal on the edge of collapse, Iran’s longstanding drug problem has fallen by the wayside.
Only now and then does the debate resurface to briefly grab headlines and disappear again, as was the case with comments in April by a senior parliamentarian who raised alarm on how substance misuse is “worryingly” spreading among Iranian juveniles.
“Regrettably, the addicts’ age has fallen to as low 10-12 years,” declared Salman Zaker, a member of the Iranian parliament’s social committee. “We in parliament can hold officials accountable and be tough, but the anti-addiction campaign needs to gain momentum within society itself.”
Zaker noted that Iran has no legal loopholes when it comes to combating narcotics and addiction, as the law has worked out an “adequate response,” suggesting that there is an implementation failure to blame.
Eskandar Momeni, secretary of the government-run Drug Combatting Headquarters, challenged Zaker’s assertion, saying the average age of addicts in Iran is 24. He attested that Iran is better off compared to world averages. “There might be a few schoolchildren with addiction, but that serves no basis for reasoning that the addiction age has gone down.”
Despite Momeni’s counterargument, the lawmaker’s caution was corroborated by outcries from nongovernmental organizations monitoring the country’s addiction struggle.
“The relevant government organizations do not fulfill their duties as they should,” complained analyst and addiction researcher Saeed Sefatian in a state radio debate last month. “When a new drug finds its way into our country, it takes the authorities some three years before they grasp the seriousness of the hazard, after many have already fallen to the trap of the new substance.”
In an interview with Iran newspaper last July, Sefatian also questioned the official approach, in which addiction is often seen with “a judicial and security” lens rather than tackled as a social malady.
In June 2020, a grim picture was painted by Farzaneh Sohrabi, the director of Cudras Institute, a Tehran-based civil group dedicated to drug abuse research and solutions. In her analogy, Sohrabi juxtaposed an alarming 8% growth in Iran’s addiction numbers with its average population growth of 2%.
Iranian authorities maintain that their long-term rehabilitation programs are more or less paying off. The Behzisiti Organization, a public institution affiliated with the Ministry of Labor, Welfare and Social Affairs, is partly dedicated to identifying and treating addicts and helping them acquire job skills. Still, the extent to which the poorly budgeted agency has succeeded remains a matter of open debate.
As a show of “might and firmness,” the law enforcement community conducts semi-regular raids of abandoned farms, shantytowns and ruins in the impoverished suburbs of the capital Tehran to round up addicts. Nevertheless, there remains a need for a professional and effective rehab program. In a familiar cycle, many of those bundled into police vans are most often sent off without receiving any treatment.
Precise and fully transparent facts and figures on Iran’s drug addiction issue have typically been held back from the public domain, partly due to the official line that either attempts to deny the extent of the crisis or considers it an embarrassment to the ruling establishment.
Ali Hashemi, a former director of Iran’s Drug Combatting Headquarters, released figures last year showing that the population of Iranian addicts had hit 4.4 million in 2015, up from 3.7 million a decade earlier. He lamented that no higher-ups seem to take the organization’s mission seriously.
Executed, mistreated, neglected
In the fallout of the 1979 revolution, a period marked by iron-fisted responses and radical sentiments, drug addicts were not spared the violent zeal. In a video from the early days of the upheaval, then-chief prosecutor and ultraconservative cleric Sadegh Khalkhali is seen in a crowd of arrested addicts, name-calling and humiliating them. While addiction has never been officially punishable by the death penalty in Iran, many of the addicts rounded up and filmed at the scene were reportedly sent to the gallows.
Decades on, varying degrees of violence against addicts continue to be reported. A culture of torture and harsh mistreatment at private and public rehabilitation centers known as “recovery camps” remains alarmingly widespread. In one reported case, prosecutors launched a probe into the death of an addict under torture in the southern town of Dokouhak in 2020. Around the same time, a video documented camp organizers in the city of Shiraz holding their patients in a pool of freezing water.
By contrast, at the opposite extreme, deliberate leniency and negligence on drug sales have turned into a matter of serious concern. Some opposition Kurdish activists, for instance, have alleged that the Islamic Republic is willfully keeping a blind eye on the spread of addiction in their region. By keeping loose controls on the sale of substances, they claim, the state is systematically placing youths in danger of addiction. From their perspective, such a policy will leave them marginalized outcasts who won’t pose any threat as dissidents the way their fathers had.
More women grapple with addiction
One 2019 estimate by the Cudras Institute pointed out how addiction is growing among women, who make up 10% of three million regular substance consumers in Iran. The institute warned about the changing patterns of addiction for women, who are increasingly using drugs as crystal meth and crack cocaine, and that the situation will only worsen in the years to come.
Iranian officials have obliquely acknowledged the malady among women in at least in two instances, linking the crisis to external plots. “Foreign enemies,” he said, have an organized and precise plan to “contaminate Iranian women with drugs” by 2025, said Ali Rahmani, a senior narcotics official in central Ghazvin province, last year.
In 2016, Mohammad Mahjouri, the local commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in the southeastern city of Zarandieh blamed “enemies” for having “customized” such drugs for Iranian women.
