Methamphetamine in Iran

[arman]

Meth use in iran:
Meth use is growing rapidly here in iran, 2 years ago almost no-one knows whats is meth, it is called "Shishe" (glass) here (BTW, still no one knows meth by its name).

Price:
It is really expensive here, actually it is the same as in the usa, but due to 1:8000 ratio between Dollar and Rial (iran money currency) it is really hard for average people to buy meth. But SWIM predicts it is going to become much cheaper in the next 2-3 years due to availability of meth production precursors which will cause a lot of people to easily cook meth everywhere in this country, but it is a slow progress cause very little number of people actually knows that it can be made easily and that precursors are available without any hassles, plus there is no meth production recipe anywhere (even on internet) available in Farsi, and many people in iran can't read english well enough. SWIM thinks meth has a really bright business future in iran.

Addiction rate:
SWIM personally can't find any meth addict here, cause only a very small percent (maybe 1%) of people have enough income to continue their meth use more than 2-3 time per month, and thats a good thing I think. and still dominant drug here (which are also really cheap) is opiods like Opium (first place+long history) and Heroin(2nd place). Almost 2 millions of iranian people (irans population is 70million) have an addiction to these drugs, one of the reasons being having a large young population (around 25%) and high rates of unemployment. So, I think iran is one of the countries with lowest meth addicts and should have lowest ratio between its non-meth addicts and its meth addicts in world.

Law and government:
But police (and special anti-drug police) never consider controlling any drug before it becomes a national disaster, I think this is also true for meth. As dogs of Iran police don't recognize meth smell, cuz they are just trained to detect heroin, opium and such. Even most polices in iran don't know about meth physical apearance. But the drug penalties are very heavy for meth cookers and dealers, but still heavier for opium and heroin dealers.

Also another bad thing about meth is that it is almost unknown (specially relative to opioids) and there is high risk of overdosage and addiction. As there is no education or warning made by government there is a growing number of misinformation around meth and other new drugs (like MDMA) which IMHO is really bad. For example many people think meth can't cause any addiction/dependence, plus a lot of antidrugs misinformation too.

Conclusion:
So, overall meth use/availaility in iran is very limited right now, but in SWIM opinion it is going to replace opioid use (which have a very long history of use) by the next generation.
(copyright SWIM+meth)

Reputation Comments on this post:

	good report
	Good situation overview
	quite an interesting post. with all the americans in iraq this seems very likely. Meth is cheap and easy as hell to ma...