TEHRAN, Iran — The skyrocketing number of drug addicts on the streets of cities in Iran, and their unstable situation, has turned into a national dilemma. Legal, judicial and security organizations are engaged in dealing with this issue. Indeed, recent remarks by Iran’s police chief, Brig. Gen. Hossein Ashtari, are proof of this. At a press conference Oct. 4, Ashtari announced that the police has prepared a report about the situation of drug addicts in urban centers across the country, and submitted it to the president, speaker of parliament and judiciary chief as well as the Iranian Security Council. “Dealing with this problematic phenomenon is one of our special programs, although its elimination requires the cooperation of all organizations,” Ashtari said.

Based on official statistics announced by Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli in August 2014, there are 1.3 million addicts in Iran. Of these, 100,000 were described as “street drug addicts.” Principlist outlet Khabar Online has published a more alarming take; last October, it quoted the head of treatment and social support at the government’s anti-drug organization as saying that there are 200,000-220,000 high-risk drug addicts on the streets in Iran. Regardless of which figure is correct, the fact remains that it is large — and it seems that the only policy that relevant organizations in Iran have adopted in dealing with addiction is to pick up drug addicts from the streets and their hangouts.

An executive manager at one of the nongovernmental organizations that provides social services for street drug addicts told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, “The only serious response that the government, police and judiciary have shown toward this bitter social reality is to use force.” He added, “At the moment there is a vicious cycle. The police attack the addicts’ hangouts, put them into vans and transfer them to mandatory rehabilitation camps, where they are forced to quit. [Once they’ve quit] they are released across the city again without any sort of support.”

The policy of clearing up the streets through force is based on Article 16 of the law on narcotics. The police favors this policy, and it seems that President Hassan Rouhani — a moderate — is also in tune with such an approach. Indeed, the huge police presence in the past year in areas where drug addicts converge follows an Oct. 8, 2014, Cabinet meeting where Rouhani highlighted begging and street drug addiction as two phenomena that are not “becoming of an Islamic Iran.” The president then personally asked the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, Interior Ministry, Iran’s police force and the municipalities to “seriously pursue ways to clean up the image of cities from such unpleasant social problems.”