In a country so harsh about other matters of personal autonomy (sex, in particular) I found it surprising that Iran would have a progressive syringe exchange policy and and a fairly gentle drug regime. From Nazila Fathi’s June 27th piece in the Times,“Iran Fights Scourge of Addiction in Plain View, Stressing Treatment:”
More than a million Iranians are addicted to some form of opium, heroin or other opium derivative, according to the government, and some estimates run as high as 10 million.
In a country where the discussion of some social and cultural issues, like homosexuality, can be all but taboo, drug addiction has been widely acknowledged as a serious problem. It is talked about openly in schools and on television. Posters have encouraged people to think of addiction as a disease and to seek treatment.
Iran’s theocratic government has encouraged and financed a vast expansion in the number of drug treatment centers to help users confront their addictions and to combat the spread of H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, through shared needles.
The center in central Tehran, which is called Congress 60 and is run by a private nonprofit agency, is one of 600 centers that provide drug treatment across the country with help from government money. An additional 1,250 centers offer methadone, free needles and other services for addicts who are not ready to quit, including food and treatment for H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted infections.
Iran’s government, trying to curb addiction’s huge social costs, has been more supportive of drug treatment than any other government in the Islamic world, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
It was not always this way. After the 1979 revolution, the government tried a more traditional approach: arresting drug users and putting them in jail.
But two decades later, it recognized that this approach had failed. A sharp increase in the crime rate and the number of people infected with H.I.V., both directly linked to a surge in narcotics use, persuaded the government to shift strategies.
“We have realized that an addict is a social reality,” said Muhammad-Reza Jahani, the vice president for the Committee Combating Drugs, which coordinates the government’s efforts to fight drug addiction and trafficking. “We don’t want to fight addicts; we want to fight addiction. We need to manage addiction.”
Apart from the observation that this is yet another piece of evidence that non-punitive approaches are more effective than “war on drugs” – it also suggest that the Iranian government is capable of changing course, rethinking problems – and thus perhaps – under the right circumstances – able to negotiate.
Tags: drug policy, harm reduction
, heroin, Iran, HIV, syringe exchange