IRAN CONFRONTS A LONG-HIDDEN PROBLEM: DRUGS

TEHRAN, Iran -- The problem of illicit drugs is commonly associated with
prosperous, liberty-minded societies in Europe and America, not a
theocratic state run by some of the Islamic world's most conservative mullahs.

But Iran is slowly discovering that it too has a drug problem. It has a
drug smuggling problem. It has a drug violence and kidnapping problem. More
and more, it seems, it has a drug use problem. And increasingly Iranian
authorities have begun to grapple with this problem in the open.

"After the revolution, our leaders thought that the idea of drug use was
imported from the West, so it was necessary to protect our society from
outside," said Afarin Rahimi, an Iranian who works for the United Nations
Drug Control Program, which opened an office in Tehran in June. "Now it's
being understood that the problem is a domestic one."

Although Iran's religious rulers were loath for many years to deal with the
problem publicly, an increase in the amount of drugs entering the country,
growing pressure from the West, and a more liberal government under
President Mohammad Khatami have brought the issue to the fore.

Over the past five years, the Iranian authorities have stepped up their
battle against well-armed smugglers who transport much of the world's
illegal supply of opium, heroin and hashish through Iran to markets both
here and in the West from sources in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In
Afghanistan, two decades of war have made the country a haven for drug
runners linked to various armed factions.

"The production of illicit drugs in Afghanistan is astonishingly high,"
said Mohammad Fallah, the director of Iran's Drug Control Headquarters, the
country's national anti-narcotics bureau. "It flows from the country like
water from a tap. We are having greater success in cutting down the flow,
but our task is difficult."

That task is harder still because Iran's location and its 1,200-mile
eastern border make it the first line of defense against the traffickers,
and it has not been an easy line to hold.

Some 2,700 Iranian law-enforcement personnel have died in Iran's quiet drug
war since the 1979 Islamic revolution -- so many that the country's Drug
Control Headquarters has even published a book of "martyrs" with
photographs and eulogies to the dead.

Despite such losses, Iran's reported seizure rates would astound
anti-narcotics forces in North America or Europe. Since 1979, authorities
say they have seized more than 1,300 tons of contraband drugs, more than
half in the past five years. Indeed, the country now accounts for 85
percent of opium seizures and more than 30 percent of heroin and morphine
seizures worldwide.

Increasingly, the smugglers are fighting back. This month, drug traffickers
kidnapped four European tourists in southern Iran, in a daring effort to
exchange them for jailed comrades, a tactic they used successfully in June
and that has escalated their challenge to authorities. The hostages have
yet to be released.

The smugglers, mainly drawn from the Baluchi people, a tribal group
straddling the Iran-Pakistan border, possess a fearsome arsenal of weapons,
many obtained from the Afghan mujahedeen who fought an American-backed war
against Soviet invaders in the 1980s.

Authorities say that heavy machine guns mounted on all-terrain vehicles
often protect drug convoys, while the traffickers themselves are sometimes
armed with rocket-propelled grenades or mortars. Iranian officials say that
some groups have shot down Iranian helicopters and warplanes with
surface-to-air weapons, including, Fallah says, American-made Stinger
antiaircraft missiles.

"The traffickers are so heavily armed that Iran's response has quite
properly been a military one," said a Western diplomat in Tehran.

The United Nations estimates that most of the 3,500 tons of opium produced
annually in Afghanistan is exported through Iran; an additional 500 tons
originates in Pakistan. Most is smuggled across Iran's eastern border
region through arid, inhospitable terrain that provides perfect cover for
the traffickers, who employ a wide array of smuggling techniques.

Some vehicles, packed with opium and heroin, are driven across remote
border areas at night. "The drivers travel only in darkness, using
night-vision goggles to see their way," said Fallah, a former intelligence
officer with the Iranian police force.

The traffickers are also known to use methods that do not rely on
technology but are nonetheless effective. Fallah described one in which
traffickers employ a mother camel that has recently given birth.

"They separate the mother from its young, leaving the baby in Iran but
taking the mother to Afghanistan," he said. "They place this female at the
head of a camel caravan, each animal loaded down with drugs. The mother
will walk night and day, leading the whole caravan, and will not stop until
it reaches its young."

Armed traffickers simply monitor the caravan's progress from a safe
distance through binoculars. "Even if we intercept the caravan, there is no
one to arrest, only camels," he said.

Not all the drugs that enter Iran leave for markets abroad, and the recent
opening of the United Nations drug-control office here has served to
highlight a growing demand for opium and heroin within Iran itself,
particularly among the 70 percent or so of the population that is under 30
and frustrated by Iran's strict social codes and high unemployment. Indeed,
officials estimate that as many as 1.2 million Iranians may be addicts.

Iran's prisons hold so many drug offenders -- 60 percent of inmates are
jailed on drug possession, dealing or trafficking offenses -- that the
judiciary has recently quit jailing offenders, opting instead for fines,
lashes and long-term treatment at one of the 40 or so outpatient centers
throughout the country.

While the drug issue is one of the few that Iran and Western countries
might agree on, Iranian officials complain that they have borne the brunt
of the fight against drug trafficking with little recognition or outside
help. Cooperation is complicated by the fact that most Western countries
have legislated against supplying military goods to Iran.

Britain recently provided 3,000 flak jackets to Iran's beleaguered border
guards, but only after the government gained special parliamentary approval
for the shipment.

"The fight has cost Iran dear and yet the West doesn't care," said Mohammed
Ali Tayarani, a deputy in Iran's 270-seat Parliament. "Prime Minister Tony
Blair gave us flak jackets; we provided the guys to wear them.

"Which is more expensive?" he asked.