Abdorrahman Boroumand Center

The spokesperson for Iran’s Drug Control Headquarters announced the results of a new survey on addiction in the country in advance of the World Day for Combatting Drugs. Research was conducted by the Ministry of Health, the State Welfare Organization, and the Drug Control Headquarters, some 30,000 representatives of which went house-to-house to conduct their surveys among citizens 15 to 64 years of age in all of the country’s provinces.

Findings include:

• The official number of addicts has reached 2,808,000, representing a 100% increase since 2011, the year a similar survey recorded 1,325,000 users. This number was first reported by two other recent studies with a sample size of 60,000, and has now been confirmed by the Drug Control Headquarters as the number of people who use drugs continuously in the course of a year.
  
  
• In the Iranian year 2016/2017, 3,190 Iranians died owing to drug abuse, a 6.2% increase over the previous year. 343 of those who died were women.
  
  
• 3,600 high school students have been identified as being at risk of addiction.
  
  
• The profile of drug use is changing rapidly. Opium, opium syrup, and methamphetamine are the most consumed substances, followed by marijuana and marijuana derivatives (11.9%) and heroin (10.6%). Methamphetamine use has declined.

The Drug Control Headquarters’ spokesperson downplayed the jump in addiction, claiming that the twofold increase represented a “decrease relative to population growth.”