Apr
25
Iran’s opium dilemma
April 25, 2008 | | Leave a Comment
By Violet Wang
Iran drug users may have only one country to blame for their addiction: its neighboring Afghanistan. While Afghanistan people
easily fell to addiction of opium because of the country’s dominant production capacity of the plant in the world, Iranians get addicted due to the flow of drugs from Afghanistan to European countries.
Iran has one of the world’s highest rates of opiate addiction and it is getting worse although Iran grows almost none of its own opium, according to the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime (UNDOC). The organization’s 2007 World Drug Report classified Iran as having one of the world’s largest increases in opiate addiction, and the government estimates there are 1.2 million drug abusers, which is 2.8 percent of people ages 15 to 64.
Following the 1979 revolution, Iran’s opium poppy crop was largely eradicated though some minor residual amounts may be grown on a non-commercial scale, UNDOC said on its website.
However, Opiate consumption is increasing in the countries surrounding Afghanistan: Pakistan, Iran and Central Asia, according to UNODC’s 2007 world drug report. This may be due to the importance of Iran as a drug trafficking rout and a drug processing place. The 2007 drug report said Large seizures of morphine in some neighbouring countries (notably Pakistan and Iran) suggested that significant amounts of morphine are still being processed into heroin in countries outside Afghanistan.
