On 2 March 2018, a fire broke out at the Republican Narcological Dispensary in Baku, Azerbaijan, a drug rehabilitation facility for patients with opiate addiction.

Civil rights activists blamed government corruption for lax fire safety measures in the facility that may have led to the accident.

In the aftermath, President Ilham Aliyev created a commission to investigate the underlying causes of the accident and announced plans to build a fully equipped rehabilitation centre nearby.

[12] A former head physician at the Respublika Narkoloji Mərkəzi, Araz Aliguliyev, stated that during his tenure (which ended in 2006) the building in question had been used only for housing archives and for "some accounting purposes".

[17] Some reports claim that the victims who were burnt alive may have been tied to their beds as a routine procedure and therefore they may have been unable to escape when the fire spread through the building.

[20] The building's windows had been barred with steel frames that could only be opened from the outside to prevent addicts from running away, and at least 55 of them were bedridden when the fire broke out.

It was tasked with investigating the fire,[31] providing assistance to the families of the victims, resettling the staff and patients of the centre and making sure that the destroyed building is reconstructed quickly.

The commission will also include the Prosecutor General as well as the ministers of health, economics, internal affairs, crisis, and social welfare of population.

[32] On March 2, the Health Ministry stated that plans had been put in place to build a new Drug Abuse Treatment Center in Sabunchu district of Baku.

[33][34] Rights groups in Azerbaijan have long accused the authoritarian regime of President Aliyev of prevalent corruption that, according to them, undermines the functioning of state institutions.

So local civil activists blamed public corruption and lack of compliance with fire safety regulations as major contributors to the blaze.

The head of the civil advocacy group Property Rights said "Fire safety regulations were not respected in the hospital’s Soviet-era wooden building".

He wrote, "Dear Mr. President, I was deeply saddened by the terrible news of numerous casualties in fire in the Drug Rehabilitation Center in Baku".