Drugs and Decay :: essays papers

Drugs and Decay Drugs and decay; Iran; Iran's losing fight against drugs. (International)(Brief Article) Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2001 Economist Newspaper Ltd. TABOO subjects, Muhammad Khatami has insisted, should be talked about. Before he was elected president in 1997, most Iranians were unaware of their high level of drug addiction. But now, thanks to press reports and unexpectedly lively debate, everyone knows that the country has about 2m opium and heroin addicts, and that the effects are tugging at the social fabric. The discussion has spurred efforts to stop the flow of Afghanistan's opium, morphine and heroin into Iran, and thence to Turkey and Western Europe. The security forces have stationed 30,000 men on the long border, and fortified lengths of it with trenches and concrete barriers. During a violent period at the end of last year, this border force, which has lost 3,000 men in two decades of fighting the smugglers, was ambushing well-armed gangs almost daily. Their efforts have brought some eye-catching successes. Iran claims 85% of world-wide opium seizures last year, and 45% of morphine and heroin seizures. In February the police raided "Cannibal Island", a squalid corner of Tehran and its biggest drugs supermarket. They arrested about 500 people, before bulldozers razed the area. "It's difficult to see what more they can do," said an admiring Keith Hellawell, the head of Britain's anti-drugs campaign, when he visited Iran earlier this year. "It's a war." To give itself a better chance, Iran has modified its foreign policy. Rather than persist with its refusal to talk to the Taliban, Iran is now helping the Afghan government to transform its poppy fields into prairies of wheat. The UN says that the Taliban may have cut poppy cultivation by 70%. Indeed, in the past three months, the price in Tehran of a mesqal of opium, the five-gram unit of choice, has soared from $2.50 to $9. But talk of victory is premature. However courageous and efficient they are, Iran's border forces and police probably intercept no more than 30% of the drugs that enter the country. Junkies and aid workers alike suspect that the rise in opium prices has less to do with crop substitution and record hauls than it has to do with stockpiling. Moreover, the price of heroin, which is more addictive and more lethal than opium, has stayed absurdly cheap: one (highly adulterated) hit in Tehran costs 50 cents.