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Iran - Rise in
Young Women Drug Addicts Triggers Alarm in Iran
GhettyPhoto
By Monavar Khalaj
– January 2, 2015
As a young, smart
and ambitious university graduate, Mahsa could have been a model of the modern
Iranian woman.
Instead, the
30-year-old symbolises a new generation of female drug users: well off, well
educated and tech savvy but addicted to multiple synthetic
drugs such as methamphetamine, methadone and sedatives as well as
heroin.
Drug problems are
not new in Iran.
Opium smoking dates back to at least the 17th century, and the country has one
of the highest rates of opiate addiction in the world.
Shisheh — a
high-purity crystalline methamphetamine — has become the second most popular
drug after opium among young people seeking an escape from social and economic
hardship.
However, addiction
is increasingly spreading across all social classes and affecting a rising
number of women — a trend triggering alarm in the government.
The problem was
first revealed in a 2011 study on the prevalence of addiction, says Zahra
Bonianian, an adviser to the state-run Drug Control Headquarters for women and
family affairs. “It was when we realised that the number of married female
addicts was going up, the age of addiction going down while the educational
level [of addicts] was high.”
The roots of the
problem lie in the social change bubbling beneath the surface of
Iranian society. Young adults, steeped in new ideas gleaned via the internet
and social media, are increasingly rebelling against the traditional and
Islamic strictures to which their parents conformed and seeking to emulate what
they see as more modern norms. In recent years, the divorce rate in Iran has
risen and marriage and birth rates have fallen.
At the same time,
the Islamic regime has improved women’s access to higher education, and they
now account for more than 60 per cent of graduates.
But young women in
particular find themselves caught between increasing freedoms and educational
opportunities on the one hand and the conservative values of their elders on
the other.
“Girls and boys
under 25 years old largely enjoy equal freedom in terms of social and
educational activities, but girls have a more gloomy perspective, [seeing] more
responsibilities ahead,” says Amir-Hossein Yazdani, a professor of psychology.
Highly educated
girls “do not enjoy equal job opportunities, or they feel under pressure to
behave like a traditional woman”, he says. “This is fanning fresh tendencies to
addiction.”
Mahsa is
emblematic of this trend. “I had big dreams, but they were all destroyed,” she
says. Graduating from a high school for top students, her family forced her to
marry at the age of 18. The couple had a son but the marriage ended in divorce
after a year and Mahsa took refuge in drugs. Her ex-husband has stopped her
from seeing her son in recent years.
She went to
university and studied psychology but ended up at a Tehran addiction treatment
centre last year with a drug habit that was costing her 1m rials ($37) a day.
After five months
of treatment she is considered clean. But fearful of social pressure, she is
refusing to return to her family in Arak, a conservative city in central Iran.
“I’ll stay at this
centre hoping that my parents will sell everything and agree to move to
Tehran,” she says, clad in tight black shirt and leggings and wearing make-up
and orange nail polish. “In that small city, everybody knows I was an addict. I
am shy to [leave the house].”
Iranian officials
and experts have been warning in recent months that the speed at which
addiction among women is growing is rising.
The latest
official figures indicate the number of female addicts has almost doubled since
2007, with women making up 9.3 per cent of Iranians affected. More than 50 per
cent of addicted women used drugs for the first time between the ages of 15 and
19.
Abbas Deilamizade,
chairman of the Asian Drug Demand Reduction NGOs Association — an umbrella
group for 32 regional organisations — warns that the country’s social welfare
system is not geared to helping female addicts.
“A lot needs to be
done to help the treatment of women,” he says. “We still do not have enough
rehabilitation centres and prevention programmes for women, and there is no
plan [for it] in the country’s social security system.”
Some experts argue
this is because women have been seen as a lower priority than men because they
make up fewer than 10 per cent of Iran’s addicts.
But Ms Bonianian
warns against complacency. “The addiction of women may not be as high as men’s.
But if fathers are like ceilings who give protection to the family, mothers are
like columns who keep the family together,” she says. “If columns collapsed,
the ceiling would fall down too, and there would be no home to live in.”