Iran Questions West’s Seriousness in Fighting Narcotics

Narcotics trafficking around the world has an annual turnover of more than $60 billion, which mostly goes to the banks of the Western countries, Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli, who also heads Iran’s anti-drugs headquarters, said on Monday.

He made the comments on the sidelines of the 6th meeting of heads of the anti-narcotics agencies of the Central Asia Quintet Coalition Group, held in Tehran.

The Iranian minister also noted that Western countries’ lack of intelligence cooperation and their lack of serious fight on money laundering and other shortcomings have raised doubts about the West’s seriousness in battling drug trafficking.

Elsewhere in his remarks, Rahmani Fazli referred to his earlier meeting with Afghanistan’s counter-narcotic minister, saying that the two sides in this meeting discussed enhanced cooperation on the fight against illicit drugs.

In recent decades, Iran has been hit by drug-trafficking, mainly because of its 936- kilometer shared border with Afghanistan, which supplies over 90% of the world's opium, the raw ingredient of heroin.

The United Nations has estimated in the past that opium trafficking accounts for up 15 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, but the figure is expected to rise as international military and development spending declines with the NATO withdrawal at the end of 2014.

Iran is on a major transit route for drugs being smuggled from Afghanistan to Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and the country's war on drug-traffickers has claimed the lives of nearly 4,000 Iranian police forces over the past 34 years.