IRAN

Iran's drug crisis is a masculine emergency that dwarfs most global comparisons. The country sits astride the world's largest opium trafficking route — from Afghanistan to Europe — and Iranian men have absorbed the supply. An estimated 2.8 million Iranians are regular drug users, overwhelmingly male, and the substances have evolved from traditional opium to crystal methamphetamine (shishe) that is destroying communities. For men crushed between sanctions-era economic despair and a theocratic system that forbids alcohol, drugs become the only escape from a reality they can't change and an identity they can't fulfill.

The "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement of 2022-2023 was rightly celebrated as a feminist uprising, but the men who joined it — and the men who were killed by security forces — carry a complex burden. Young Iranian men who protested alongside women did so knowing they would face harsher punishment (men were executed at higher rates than women), and their participation represented a rejection of the gheirat system that their culture demands they uphold. These men chose to stand with women rather than over them, and the state punished them for it. The economic sanctions create a masculine crisis that Western policy rarely considers: when your country's currency is worthless and your job prospects are nil, the provider identity that Iranian culture demands becomes a daily humiliation. Men can't afford the mahr (dowry) to marry, can't support the families they have, and can't emigrate because their passports are internationally constrained.