The Relationship between Socio-Economic Development Indicators and Death Due to Drug Use in Iran from 1991 to 2020: A Time-Series Analysis

The present research aimed to investigate the death due to drug use in terms of socio-economic development indicators.

This research was conducted by the time-series method in the period of 1991-2020. The required data were collected from the Iranian Statistics Center, the Forensic Medicine Organization, the Anti-Narcotics Headquarters, and the World Bank. To measure the short-term and long-term relationships, the autoregressive distributed lag model was used in Microfit software.

The results showed that the gross domestic product and literacy had a significant positive relationship with the death rate due to drug use, but the inflation rate did not. The variables of urban population and unemployment rate also showed a significant negative relationship with the dependent variable. Therefore, the existence of a long-term relationship between socioeconomic development indicators and the death rate due to drug use was confirmed. The results also indicated that the coefficients of the regression estimates were stable because the movement path of the variable of death due to drug use located between two bands.

Socioeconomic macro indicators affect death due to drug use in Iran as an acute social problem in the long run. Specifically, the death due to drug use has increased with the growth of gross domestic product and literacy, and has decreased with the growth of the urban population and the unemployment rate.