According to the latest official survey in the country, the number of drug addicts in Iran stands at four million, with more than 2.5 million current users, it said.
Drug smuggling and sales in Iran was a 10 billion dollar market last year, nearly three quarters of the total revenue from its oil market during the same period, according to the same official survey.
Even so, the latest government statistics are believed by many Iran experts to be far short of the actual numbers of drug addicts.
Previous estimates have put the total number of illegal-drug users in Iran at more than seven million.
On April 7, Akbar Alami, a member of Irans Majlis (parliament) from Tabriz (northwest Iran), went public and revealed that the actual number of drug users in Iran stood at 11 million.
Irans government is under close scrutiny for the level of narcotics found in Iranian cities. Many experts fear that certain departments and officials within the Iranian regime are overseeing foreign narcotics imports.
In January a similar report was released which showed that one out of every seventeen people in Irans 70-million-population was using illegal drugs regularly.
