According to Iran’s official statistics, 13 Iranians die every day due to drug abuse.
The director-general of treatment and social support of the country’s anti-narcotics headquarters said that there are about 2.8 million addicts in Iran. In addition, 1.6 million people use drugs recreationally.
Statistics that are painful and cannot be ignored, and simplistic from various cultural, social, health, and even economic and political dimensions.
Addiction in socially and culturally developed countries is studied so seriously that today they have stable and well-known solutions to this problem.
The reality is that in Iran no one is well informed about the dimensions of addiction and the reality is being held behind closed doors hidden.
Reza Tuyserkanmanesh, Director General of Treatment and Social Support of the Anti-Narcotics Headquarters announced the increase of drug and psychedelic drug addiction in the country last June at the opening ceremony of a new factory to produce addiction treatment drugs with new technology.
According to this official, there are about 2.8 million regular drug users in Iran. This figure is equivalent to 4.5% of the active population of the country. Some 1.6 million people in the country use drugs non-continuously and recreationally. In total, it gives us a terrible number of 4.4 million people.
According to the statistics provided by the government, which are thought to be less than the real numbers, about four to five thousand people die every year in the country due to drug abuse, i.e., about 12 to 13 people die every day due to drug abuse, which means that more than 10 Iranian families are mourning every day for their lost relatives. These statistics show the extremely terrible situation of Iran’s society.
Tuyserkanmanesh also stated about the distribution of this percentage and the statistics of addiction in different classes of Iran’s society that in the working population more than 22%, in the university student population about 2%, the high school student population less than 5% and among women 0.6%.
One out of every four Iranian workers who is struggling with his life because of the minimum wages which are under the poverty line, high costs, and inflation, has succumbed himself to the deadly magic of narcotics, and the rest of them are on this death road to raise that percentage sooner than someone can imagine.
The director-general of treatment and social support of the Anti-Narcotics Headquarters says that there are 7,462 outpatient centers for addiction treatment in the country, which provided services to about 1.2 million people last year. There are also 1,146 medium-term accommodation centers for the treatment of addicts in the country, which last year admitted more than 214,000 people.
From these figures, we can see that addiction in Iran has become one of the biggest social challenges, even if the government is trying to keep it hidden from the public.
And the reasons for such a spread of addiction in Iran are very simple.
Lack of social freedoms to scrutinize problems, impediments to any growth and awareness for the country’s youth, psychological pressures on people because of the regime’s malign political activities, lack of recreational facilities in cities that change their colors to gray.
And in addition to all these, the economic hardships, and the terrible prospects that every young and even middle-aged person has in mind for their future and that of their families, are all and all the realities of Iran’s society that none of the officials speaks about them.
