>>"I am going to eat poison to make myself too distasteful for you. Once I am sure you cannot eat me, I will eat vitamins to make myself feel better".<<
Iran had better take the vitamins quick.
>>Pressures from below
Ramin Jahanbegloo
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Growing popular discontent may wind up leading to spontaneous local upheavals in such large cities as Tehran, Isfahan, Mashad, and Tabriz—largely due to the sickness of the Iranian economy. Despite rising prices for oil, Iran's main export, the governor of the nation's central bank announced in March 2002 that the foreign debt stood at $20 billion. Productivity is low; underemployment and outright joblessness are high; inflation ranges from 20 to 50 percent; and the living standards of most Iranians are below what people enjoyed under the Pahlavi monarchy during the oil-boom years of the 1970s. Each year, more than 750,000 Iranians enter a labor market that has been adding only about 300,000 new jobs annually. According to Iran's labor ministry, more than four million Iranians are unemployed. For those who do have work, wages stagnate while inflation eats away at their buying power. Less-skilled workers are hit especially hard. According to a November 2001 report by the Iranian Statistics Center, a government agency, 5 percent of Iranians live in "absolute poverty" and the vast majority of others need to hold two jobs just to pay for basic needs. According to the reformist daily Hayat-e-No, real housing and energy costs have risen 70 percent [End Page 129] since 1998, while goods and services have grown 50 percent more expensive.
These harsh economic conditions have come with predictably distressing social costs: marked increases in drug addiction, crime, and prostitution. A July 2000 report by Mohammad Ali Zam, a Tehran official in charge of cultural affairs, claimed that prostitution had skyrocketed in Iran between 1998 and 1999. According to a January 2002 report published in the daily Entekhab, there are now 20,000 professional prostitutes in Tehran, mainly runaway girls who have been hired by the city's criminal gangs. And principally because of the dramatic increases in drug addiction, crime, and prostitution, Iran now has serious problems with HIV/AIDS.
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