Sepahvand, a member of parliament, stated that the opium poppy drug market has been completely handed over to Afghanistan due to cultivation restrictions in Iran.
Reza Sepahvand, the representative of Khorramabad and Chegeni in the parliament, criticized Iran’s anti-drug policies, including the ban on poppy cultivation and its impact on the country’s medicinal need for morphine, at a press conference held on May 7 in Khorramabad. He said that by abandoning domestic capacity, we have paved the way for Afghanistan’s cultivation and export development, while now we are forced to import impure and low-quality opium, despite the possibility of controlled and high-quality domestic production.
Several years ago, the state news agency IRNA reported, citing experts, that to produce about 30 tons of morphine needed by the pharmaceutical industry in Iran, approximately 300,000 kilograms of pure opium or 600,000 kilograms of raw opium is required.
Considering Mr. Sepahvand’s statement that it is possible to harvest 25 kilograms of opium per hectare, producing this amount would require 24 hectares of land under opium cultivation, which he mentioned as 80,000 hectares in his remarks.
