Opiates of the Iranian People

After Iran's theocratic government came to power in 1979, it displayed zero tolerance for drugs, filling the prisons with addicts. "We paid a high price for it," said Ali Hashemi, head of the cabinet-level Drug Control Headquarters.

Having since embraced policies grounded in pragmatism, Tehran has provided surprising freedom in drug treatment, subsidizing needle exchanges and methadone centers. The government also has funded energetic efforts to stanch the flow of opiates on the trafficking routes into the country. In the last decade, thousands of Iranian troops and police officers have been killed battling smugglers, most along the porous borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"Our people in Iran have been in the front line in this war on drugs," Hashemi said.

Yet despite such bloodstained evidence, drugs remain so prevalent that many Iranians describe their availability as evidence of a government plot. After students rioted at Tehran University in 1999, residents of a locked-down dormitory told of drug dealers being allowed in to distribute narcotics for free.

"I believe this is the policy of the state, to make all the youth addicted," said Hamid Motalebi, 22, a police officer on duty in a south Tehran park almost overrun by junkies sleeping on the grass or staggering like zombies. "It's the lack of policy and management. If they could create enough jobs, enough entertainment, why would people turn to drugs?"

The Aftab Society, a drug rehab center, stands off a busy street toward the northern edge of a capital city where fortunes tend to follow geography. The farther north you live, the richer you are. Aftab's clients are wealthy enough to pay for beds in a detoxification ward upstairs from the offices where outpatients gather twice a week for group therapy.

"Those who are usually referred to us are educated," said Nassrin Tehrani, an executive at the Aftab Society. "Put yourself in their place. If you're educated, you've got high expectations. When the expectations are not fulfilled, the first reaction is depression. After that, the use of drugs begins."

In one evening session, 18 men and women nodded along as a bearded, middle-aged man listed withdrawal symptoms: achy joints, aggression, sleeplessness.

"But I got over all of them," the man said, "because I got a job."

A few miles to the south, on the broad streets of Tehran's aging core, taxi drivers and other working-class addicts lined up for free methadone at an imposing government building. The National Center for Addiction Studies deals mostly with addicts who have taken opium for years while essentially functioning normally. Mokri, the center's director, compares this type of use, called "instrumental use," to the chewing of cocoa leaves in South America or heavy addiction to nicotine.

But the toll on Iranian society is staggering. Mokri estimates that 20 percent of Iran's adult population is "somehow involved in drug abuse." The estimate includes half a million dealers, each selling to three or four people, at a total cost of $3 billion to $5 billion annually. The problem has reached proportions that could be approached only in terms of management, he said.

"I believe the narcotics dependence system has become so large you should try to enter it rather than to annihilate it," Mokri said. This year he launched a program of dispensing tinctures of opium in the medicinal form that physicians prescribed a century ago, when Iran cultivated its own poppies. He said the country should consider doing so again, under U.N. supervision, to prevent a replay of the events of the last five years.