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Iran: Increased Number of Addicts Pushes Toward Bill on Drugs | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English Archive 2005 -2017
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Confiscated opium on display in Zahedan, Iran. Reuters/Caren Firouz


London- Days after the Judicial Committee of the Iranian Parliament’s House spokesman Hassan Norouzi approved a bill that would allow the Iranian government to distribute drugs among addicts, an official in the Expediency Discernment Council of the System revealed that 17 percent of Iranians tend to abuse drugs while 220,000 to 250,000 others are drug traffickers.

Head of a working group on drugs in the Expediency Council Saeed Safatian defended a new project that permits the Iranian government to distribute drugs on addicts to curb this phenomenon.

“A total of 17 percent of Iranians tends to abuse drugs,” said Safatian, adding that five percent of them are already addicts while the remaining 12 percent will fall for the trap if the consumption of drugs wasn’t controlled.

Norouzi announced that the parliament approved last Friday the draft, which was also endorsed by decision-making centers.

Commenting on the draft, he added that penalty has been reduced from execution to imprisonment for those possessing less than 100 kilograms of antidote, producing two kilograms of synthetic drugs or carrying five kilograms of it.

Ali Hashemi, head of the counter-drugs committee, stated to Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA) on Saturday that distributing drugs by the government reduces dirty money possessed by traffickers.

He added that adopting the policy of bringing down demand on drugs helps decrease the amount of money earned by gangs from selling drugs.

On June 26, the counter-drugs committee unveiled the first official statistics after five years, which showed that 2,800,000 Iranians are drugs addicts.

The statistics also revealed the widespread of antidote (66.8 percent), marijuana and weed (11.9 percent) and heroine and cocaine (10.6 percent).