TEHRAN, Iran — Babak Dinparast, the Deputy for Treatment and Prevention of the Iranian Anti-Drug Agency, visited the National Institute of Addiction Studies at the Tehran University of Medical Sciences two weeks ago. During the visit, he released the latest statistics on the rate of addiction in Iran. The numbers can potentially be considered alarming for the government and administrative structure: Dinparast said 53% of the drug users in Iran are employed by government agencies and organizations.

In March of last year, Dinparast had given the number of people in Iran suffering from drug addiction to be 3.5 million people. However, he had said that most of these were recreational users. On the number of serious users, he said “based on the latest count which was collected with the help of Jahad Daneshgahi (The Academic Center for Education, Culture and Research), we have 1,325,000 addicts.”

Even if we discount the 3.5 million and go with the number of 1.3 million, and considering the latest announcement, this means that 703,000 current employees of the Iranian government are drug users.

Iran is a country with an extensive and complicated bureaucracy. With a population of close to 78 million people, about 2 million people are considered government employees. The exact number of permanent and contractual employees is not known and different numbers are often given for them. For example, in 2009, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s assistant secretary for labor and job creation said, “The number of government employees has increased from 849,000 in 1979 to more than 2 million today, of whom over 80% are permanent and contractual.”