Introduction

What does the history of drugs consumption tells us of the life and place of Iranians in the modern world?Footnote ²

Narcotics, themselves a quintessential global commodity, figured prominently in the history of Iran. It all started with opium in ancient times. Panacea painkiller, lucrative crop, poetic intoxicant and sexual inhabitant, in the course of the twentieth century traditional opium users found themselves in a semantic landscape populated by the announcement of modernity. A ‘psychoactive revolution’ had happened worldwide, in which Iranians participate actively: people acquired the power to alter their state of mind, at their will and through consumption of psychoactive substances. Availability of psychoactive drugs had become entrenched in the socio-economic fabric of the modern world, complementing the traditional use of drugs, opium in particular, as a medical remedy.Footnote ³ With high drug productivity and faster trade links at the turn of the twentieth century, narcotics became widely available across the world. Iran, for that matter, produced large amounts of opium since the commercialisation of agriculture, which occurred in the late nineteenth century.

Old rituals turned into modern consumption, which was technological, through the use of hypodermic needles and refined chemicals; stronger, with more potent substances; and, crucially, speedier.Footnote ⁴ This ‘psychoactive revolution’ did not proceed unnoticed by political institutions. Although nameless characters in modern history, drug users have been an object of elites’ concerns in the political game of disciplining, modernisation and public order.Footnote ⁵ Spearheaded by the United States’ reformist momentum, a new regime of regulation of psychoactive substances, initiated in the early 1900s, reshaped the world into a more moral, read sober, one.Footnote ⁶ By the mid 1950s, consumption of intoxicants found narrow legitimate space and it was clamped down on by the police. Orientalised as a cultural practice of enslaving ‘addiction’ and pharmacological dependency, the use of drugs outside the West emerged in dialogue with global consumption trends and not simply as a tale of mimicry of Western consumption.Footnote ⁷

This chapter provides the background to the transformations that drug policy experienced before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. It describes processes of state formation, drugs politics and addiction during the pre-1979 period.Footnote ⁸ As in the case of other state policies during this era, ‘abrupt reversals, sudden initiatives and equally sudden retreats’ characterise drugs politics.Footnote ⁹ Iran adopted the whole range of policies with regard to narcotic drugs – from laissez-faire legalisation to total ban – since the inception of the first prohibitionist agenda in 1909 and, especially, over a period of four decades, between 1941 and 1979, when drug prohibition became a central element of the domestic and international discourse. Before streaming into this historical trajectory, the chapter discusses briefly the birth of the category of ‘addiction’ (eti‘yad) in its global-local nexus. This is situated in a period of great political transformation, corresponding to the Constitutional Revolution (1906–11) and the slow demise of the Qajar dynasty (1780–1925). The birth of ‘addiction’, one could argue, coincided with the naissance of modern political life in Iran.

Modernity and Addiction

American sociologist Harry Levine argues that the category of addiction is an invented concept dating back to the late eighteenth century. Its immediate relation is not to the idea of inebriation, as one might think, but to that of individual freedom, and therefore, to liberal governance.Footnote ¹⁰ The word ‘addiction’ itself has its etymological root in the Latin addicere, which refers to the practice of enslaving someone. In Persian, the Arabic-origin term e‘tiyad, suggests the chronic return, relapse or familiarity to something. Both terms express the impossibility of being ‘free’ and, therefore, the inability to make judgements or take decisions (especially in the case of addicere). This idea, generated in the medical knowledge of late nineteenth century Europe, gained prominence in Iran when foreign-educated students returned to their country and started using the lexicon, images and aetiology of Western medicine. Incidentally, Iranian intellectuals had relied almost exclusively on the accounts of foreign travellers in order to narrate the history of drugs, thus orientalising the life of the drug itself.Footnote ¹¹

The emergence of a discourse on prohibition signed a moment of modernity in the political life of the early twentieth century, a modernity which was, nonetheless, at odds with the everyday life of Iranians. There, opium was the unchallenged remedy of the masses; it was administrated by local apothecaries (‘attari) as painkiller, sedative for diarrhoea, lung problems, universal tonic or, simply, a panacea for just about everyone who manifested symptoms, however vague, of physical or psychological malaise. The hakim – a traditional doctor – would dispense it ‘when challenged by an illness that he could not treat’.Footnote ¹² British doctors travelling in Iran reveal that ‘to practice medicine among Persians means constant contact with the subject of addiction to opium. It crops up a dozen times a day … ’.Footnote ¹³ Rather than being only a medical remedy, opium also had its place in everyday rituals and practices. Opium smoking, using a pipe (vafur) and a charcoal brazier (manqal), usually occurred in front of an audience – either other opium smokers or just attendees – the interaction with whom encouraged the reciting of poetry – Sa‘adi, Ferdowsi and Khayyam being main poetic totems – and inconclusive discussions about history and the past in general. Opium had the reputation of making people acquire powerful oratorical skills. This circle, doreh, enabled ties of friendship and communality to evolve around the practice of smoking, especially among middle and upper classes, with opium being ‘the medium through which members of a group organized’.Footnote ¹⁴ In the course of the twentieth century, people habituated to this practice were referred to, somewhat sarcastically, as the pay-e manqali, ‘those who sit at the feet of the brazier’. Conviviality, business, relaxation and therapy converged in the practice of opium smoking.

Opium was a normative element of life in Iran. At the end of the day of fasting or before the sunrise hour in the month of Ramadan, ambulant vendors would provide water and, for those in need, opium pills by shouting in the courtyards and in front of the mosques, ‘there is water and opium! [ab ast va taryak]’.Footnote ¹⁵ In northern Iran, mothers would give small bits of opium to their children before heading to the fields to work. Later, before bedtime, children would be given a sharbat-e baccheh (the child’s syrup), made of the poppy skin boiled with sugar, which would ensure a sound sleep.Footnote ¹⁶ These stories have global parallels; in for instance popular narratives in southern Italy, under the name of papagna (papaverum), and in the UK under the company label of Godfrey’s Cordial. At the time of modernisation, such practices contributed to the demonization of the popular classes (workers and peasants) in the public image, describing their methods as irresponsible and not in tune with modern nursing practices.Footnote ¹⁷ Individual use, instead, would be later described by modernist intellectual Sadegh Hedayat through his novels’ narrators, whose characters dwelled, amid existential sorrows and melancholies, on opium and spirit taking.Footnote ¹⁸ By 1933, Sir Arnold Wilson, the British civil commissioner in Baghdad, would be adamant arguing that ‘[t]he existence in Western countries of a few weak-minded drug addicts is a poor excuse for under-mining by harassing legislation the sturdy individualism that is one of the most enduring assets of the Persian race’.Footnote ¹⁹ The frame of addiction as inescapably connected to opium use, however, had already been adopted by Iranian intellectuals and political entrepreneurs in the early days of the Constitutional Revolution. The demise of the old political order, embodied by the ailing Qajar dynasty, unleashed a reformist push that affected the social fabric – at least in the urban areas – and models of governance, with their far-reaching influence over individuals’ public life.

Reformists and radicals in the early twentieth century, either inspired by the Constitutionalist paradigm or because they effectively took part in the upheaval, called for a remaking of Iranian society and of national politics, starting from the establishment of a representative body, the Parliament (Majles) and the adoption of centralised, administrative mechanism in health, education, language, social control and the like. Constitutionalists represented a wide spectrum of ideas and persuasions, but their common goal was reforming the old socio-political order of Qajar Iran. Modernisation, whatever its content implied, was the sole and only medium to avoid complete subjugation to the imperial West.

By then, opium had come to play an important role in the economy of Iran, known at the time as Persia. In the Qajar economy, the poppy was a cash crop that provided steadfast revenues in a declining agricultural system. With commercialisation of agricultural output, opium became omnipresent and with it the habit of opium eating, supplanted since the early 1900s with opium smoking. Constitutionalists referred to opium addiction as one of the most serious social, political ills afflicting the country. They were actively advocating for a drastic cure of this pathology, which metaphorically embodied the sickness of late Qajar Iran.Footnote ²⁰ Hossein Kuhi Kermani, a poet and reformist intellectual active over these years, reports that when Constitutionalists conquered Tehran, they started a serious fight against opium and the taryaki (aka, teryaki, the opium user), with missions of police officers and volunteers in the southern parts of Tehran with the objective to close down drug nests.Footnote ²¹ These areas would be theatres of similar manifestations a hundred years later, under the municipal pressure of Tehran’s administrations.Footnote ²²

The Constitutionalists’ engagement with the problems associated with opium coincided on the international level with the first conferences on opium control. The first of these meetings happened in Shanghai in 1909, the milestone of the prohibitionist regime in the twentieth century. In Shanghai, Western powers attempted to draw an overview of the world’s drug situation in a bid to regulate the flow of opium and instil a legibility principle in terms of production and trade, with the ultimate objective to limit the flow of commercial opium only to medical needs. Iran participated in the meeting as part of its bid to join the global diplomatic arena of modernity. Ironically, the Iranian envoy at this meeting, Mirza Ja‘far Rezaiof, was himself an opium trader, disquieted by an appointment which could have potentially ‘cut his own throat’, given that opium represented Iran’s major export and his principle business.Footnote ²³

Amidst the momentum of the Constitutionalists’ anti-opium campaigns, Iran became the first opium-producing country to limit cultivation, and to restrain opium use in public.Footnote ²⁴ On March 15, 1911, a year before The Hague Convention on Opium Control, the Majles approved the Law of Opium Limitation (Qanun-e Tahdid-e Tariyak), enforcing a seven-year period for opium users to give up their habit.Footnote ²⁵ This provision also made the government effectively accountable for the delivery of opium to the people, with the creation of a quota system (sahmiyah), which required the registration of drug users through the state administrative offices and the payment of taxes against the provision of opium. In other words, the law sanctioned public/state intervention in the private sphere of individual behaviour – i.e. consumption – and granted the inquisitor’s power to the officials of the Ministry of Finance. Even though this decision did not mean prohibition of the poppy economy, it signified that the new politics triggered by the Constitutionalist Revolution followed lines tuned with global trends towards the public space and therefore with modern life (style).

Whether opium prohibition was inspired and reproduced under the influence of Western countries or it had indigenously emerged, is a debate that extends beyond the scope of this chapter.Footnote ²⁶ What can be discerned here however, are the effects of state-deployed control policies on the social fabric. The formation of modern Iranian state machinery made possible a steady intrusion, though fragmentary, into the life of opium users and of opium itself. In the pre-twentieth-century period, in fact, Iranian rulers had at different times ruled in favour of or against the use of opium and other drugs (including wine), but at no time had they had the means to control people’s behaviour and so affect the lives of multitudinous drug users. The Shahs themselves have been known, in popular narratives, as divided into those fighting against, or those indulging in, the use of opium. At times, the rulers would indulge in drug use so heavily as to destabilise their reign.Footnote ²⁷ By the time of the Constitutional Revolution, the idea of a ruler whose mind and body is intoxicated by opium or other substances had become a central political theme, fuelling, among other things, an Orientalist portrayal of power in the Eastern world. The reformers of this period used the failure of past sovereigns to warn against the danger of intoxication, marking clearly that modernity did not have space for old pastimes. Genealogically, reformers interpreted opium and addiction to it as the cause of national backwardness, a leitmotif among revolutionaries during the Islamic Revolution of 1979 (Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1

Donkey Smoking Opium in a Suit

The small statue dates back to the late 1950s, early 1960s.

Courtesy of Antonio Mazziatelli, former UNODC representative in Iran.

State Building on Drugs

When the old Qajar monarchy fell apart and the military autocrat Reza Khan rose to power, the priorities of the Constitutional Revolution narrowed down to the imperative of state building, centralisation, control over the national territory and systematic taxation. For this and other reasons, the poppy maintained its firm place as a key asset in the national economy. Opium represented a major source of state building for the newly established Pahlavi state from 1925 onwards. It contributed directly to the creation and upgrading of the national army, a fact that, by 1928, pushed Reza Shah to create the Opium State Monopoly.Footnote ²⁸ By that time, Iran was producing 30 per cent of the world’s opium, exporting enormous, unregistered quantities towards East Asia.Footnote ²⁹ Although the government intended to restrain opium consumption, they were neither capable, nor willing to give up an important share of their revenues, some years as high as 9 per cent of the total gross domestic product.Footnote ³⁰ As a strategic asset, opium never came under full state control; resilient farmers, including nomadic tribes threatened by the encroachment of the state and its anti-tribal/sedentarisation policy, continued to harvest and bargain with the authorities, at times successfully, at others contentiously. Emblematic of the contentious nature of opium politics, even before Pahlavi modernisation, was the bast (sanctuary) taken by the people of Isfahan in the city’s Telegraph Compound in 1923, which, in a matter of days, if not hours, turned into a full seven-thousand-person demonstration against attempts by the central government to gain full control, with hefty taxation, over the production of opium.Footnote ³¹ Members of the clergy participated, not least because considerable portion of vaqf lands (religious endowments) in Iran’s southwest were cultivated with the poppy. Opium, as such, constituted a vital source of capital, which made poppy growers (or better, their capitalist patrons) the wealthiest class.Footnote ³² Inevitably, this led to an economy of contraband of vast proportions, which had few equals globally and which supplied the market at its bottom and top ends, respectively petty merchants in the many ports connecting Bushire to Vladivostok, and legitimate pharmaceutical houses which used Persian opium ‘because of its superior quality and high morphine content’.Footnote ³³ Capital accumulation over the first half of the twentieth century among a circumscribed class of landowners might have well occurred because of opium production.Footnote ³⁴

Beside the international trafficking networks, the opium economy produced a social life of its own, one in which, well into the Pahlavi era, the presence of the state remained a latency. With the creation of the Opium Monopoly, the state required all the opium produced locally to be stocked into governmental warehouses, which were administrated by state officials. Yet, much of the opium sap never reached these locations or, when it actually did, it did so only at face value, with quantities much inferior to the actual production. Concealed during the harvest period, opium was then sold at a higher price to smugglers who would resell abroad at higher rates.Footnote ³⁵

The list of those involved in the opium economy was not restricted to landowners, cultivators and smugglers. Labourers, commission and export merchants, brokers, bazaar agents, chiefs, clerks, manipulators, packers, porters, carpenters, coppersmiths, retailers, and mendicants were part of this line of production. During harvest time, they were often accompanied by a motley crowd of dervishes, story-tellers, musicians, owners of performing animals and a whole industry of amusement providers who were paid for their company or ‘given alms by having the flat side of the opium knife scrapped on their palms’.Footnote ³⁶ An observer of such events reports from 3,000 to 5,000 strangers in a single area during the harvest season. The village mullahs, who might have blessed the event with a salavat (eulogy to the prophet and his family) were given sap of premium opium as tokens of gratitude . In the first decades of the century, among the 80,000 inhabitants of Isfahan, about one quarter gained their living directly or indirectly in the opium economy.Footnote ³⁷ The front store of shops advertised the narcotic with signs as such ‘Here the best Shirazi and Isfahani Opium is sold!’Footnote ³⁸ Stephanie Cronin indicates that, in certain regions of the country, opium had even become a local currency in times of political instability.Footnote ³⁹ When the modernising state increased its effort at controlling the opium economy, the effect was that the large number of middlemen and beneficiaries of this economy remained unemployed or saw their revenues decline significantly. It is plausible to think that many of these categories joined forces with the widespread associations of smugglers which had enriched the informal economy ever since. The risk of ‘moral reputation’ and ‘moral isolation’ compelled Iranian policymakers to cooperate with the international drug control regime.Footnote ⁴⁰ For the first time in Iranian history, the crime of smuggling (qachaq) was also included in a new legislation. It is reported that between the late 1920s and the early 1930s, more than 10,000 traffickers were arrested per year, prompting the government to acknowledge that there were more people smoking contraband opium than government opium.Footnote ⁴¹ Yet, while signing the Geneva Convention on Opium Control (1925), a diplomatic agreement that provided statistical information on the production and trade of opium, the Iranian delegation maintained its reservations on the key issue of certification and restriction of exports to those countries in which opium trading was illegal.Footnote ⁴² Smuggling flourished as never before, a historical fact that deserves a more accurate account than that provided here.

Reza Shah himself was a regular user of opium, although it is said, perhaps hagiographically, that he smoked twice a day standing on his feet – as opposed to those laying on their side indulging in poetry, conversation and day-dreaming.Footnote ⁴³ In this image, one can interpret the difference between the traditional Shahs of the pre-Pahlavi period – several of them known opium users – and the moderniser Shah who used opium without losing his mental alertness and bodily stamina. Together with the Islamic veil, the traditional hat, nomadic life and sufi practice (tasavvof), opium smoking was in fact seen as a habit that would have little space in the making of modern Iran.Footnote ⁴⁴ Its place, even within the practice of apothecaries, had to be substituted by modern science and Western medicine. Restrictions started to be applied to opium, as other allegedly customary elements such as ethnic attire, the veil and traditional hats were banned from being used in public. Reza Shah banned the use of opium for those in the army and in the bureaucracy.Footnote ⁴⁵ Nevertheless, the Majles itself reportedly had a lounge in which deputies could ease their nerves and discuss issues of concern over an opium pipe.Footnote ⁴⁶ It was the façade of the life of opium, particularly when confronted by Western observers, which preoccupied the Shah. To demonstrate that the real concern of the government was alignment with Western models of governance and behaviour, in 1928 the government approved the Opium Restriction Act, which made opium cultivation legitimate only after government certification through the State Opium Organisation. The Organisation supervised all opium exports as agreed by the 1925 Geneva Agreement; together with the Ministry of Finance, it collected the opium residue (sukhteh) from public places and managed the sale of cooked opium residue (shireh-ye matbukh) to the smoking houses (shirehkesh khaneh).Footnote ⁴⁷ The idea that the government was keen to purchase the residue of smoked opium contributed, indirectly, to the shift from traditional opium eating – as it had been diffused in Iran from times immemorial – to smoking, which was a practice emerging at the turn of twentieth century, under the influence of Chinese opium culture. This shift in governmental policy had a lasting effect on drug consumption over the following decades.

Under the order of the Allied forces and with the Anglo-Soviet Occupation of Iran, Reza was sent into exile in 1941. Earlier that year, the government had, in a populist push, banned opium production in twenty-two regions – but not Isfahan – in a move that would have had drastic consequences were Iran not occupied by the Allied Forces.Footnote ⁴⁸ De facto, the ban was a complete failure. Cultivators in these regions protested by selling their opium at very cheap prices, in order to empty their stock so that the government had to allow cultivation again in order to refill the national opium reservoir, a strategic asset in periods of conflict.Footnote ⁴⁹ The resilience and tactics of the farmers exemplified well the influence that these non-elites could have on policymakers. However, the consequences of their defiance were catastrophic; cheap prices combined with the perception of opium as an essential source of relief from pain and protection against illnesses, incited large numbers of Iranians to consume it and, in some cases, to set up small opiate factory-shops to cook and sell the opium residue.Footnote ⁵⁰

It is with the setting up of these small opium-cooking factories that an opium derivate gained popularity among the working class: shireh. Considered more detrimental and addictive than opium, with a higher morphine content, shireh was sought by longer-term smokers. Mostly smoked by working-class men in specific factory-shops, it had a greater stigma, often making it comparable to that of the brothels in the moralising public narratives.Footnote ⁵¹ Interestingly enough, these places were called dar-ol-‘alaj, the Arabic expression for ‘clinic’ or ‘treatment house’, which hints at the inseparability of recreational and self-medicine in opiate use over this period.Footnote ⁵² In Tehran alone, there were more than a hundred shirehkesh-khaneh spread across the city from south to north. In one instance, a bus operated as a peripatetic smoking house on the Karaj road to avoid police raids aimed at closing them. The driver’s aid shouted the slogan, ‘we take away dead, we bring back alive [morde mibarim, zendeh miyarim]’.Footnote ⁵³ But the widespread use of opium and shireh reached a climax during the allied occupation (1941–46), due to the unsettling conditions in which most people lived, especially in the central and northern regions.

War, Coups d’État and International Drug Control (1941–55)

In 1944, the government of the United States circulated a joint resolution signed by Congress among all opium-producing countries, which urged these countries to effectively eradicate or reduce poppy cultivation and to limit their opium production to legitimate medical needs.Footnote ⁵⁴ One of the primary reasons was the seizure of opium in the United States, three-quarters of which had allegedly originated in Iran and crossed the Pacific thanks to Chinese merchants heading to San Francisco.Footnote ⁵⁵ Thus, a global network of opium smuggling had been born before the coming of organised criminal groups, although the Iranian authorities maintained that they had progressively eradicated poppy cultivation (Table 2.1). The reality on the ground, in fact, spoke of a stupendous flow of opium out of Iran, much to the concern of Western powers – a concern that was mostly an expression of concern (the threat of opiate addiction against the nation), without real concern (the embeddedness of opiates in popular practice).

By the end of World War II, a small number of US narcotics officials, many of whom had been previously working as intelligence officers, helped the Pahlavi state to re-produce a prohibitionist regime in Tehran, which, in their strategy had to embody a global model for the rest of the region and beyond.Footnote ⁵⁷ Through this collaboration, US influence within Iran increased significantly, especially for what concerned the repressive, coercive institutions of the Pahlavi state: police, intelligence and the army. For their part, the Iranian authorities had repeatedly played the opium card to convince the United States to provide development assistance funds, by highlighting the threats of opiates and Soviet communism. In this setting, Iranian authorities remained purposefully ambivalent, refusing to provide clear information to the FBN officials, convinced also of the geopolitical relevance that Iran had acquired in respect to the Soviet anathema. Knowledge about the drug situation came mostly from non-governmental sources, which at times concocted a distorting image of opium consumption and culture in Iran.Footnote ⁵⁸

The emergence of the Society for the Fight against Alcohol and Opium, created in 1943, proved tactical to this situation. It campaigned aggressively for the prohibition of all alcoholic spirits and opiates and announced astonishing data on ‘addiction’. In its first three years, it distributed around 80,000 information leaflets, participated in more than a hundred public meetings and intervened regularly on national radio.Footnote ⁵⁹ Members of this organisation belonged exclusively to the elites, among whom were members of parliament, judges, prominent public figures and their wives. Their influence operated in a discursive way towards the public, but it also affected the perception of the drug problematique among the authorities, including American officials. They circulated statistics, for instance, with the purpose of engendering a sense of crisis:

Furthermore, the Society arranged theatre pieces about opium which often depicted a caricatured opium smoker as the sources of all social and family evils, from which the expression khanemansuzi (burning one’s household) gained popularity. On November 22, 1946, the Society organised a public ceremony of the vafursuzan (opium pipe burning, literally ‘those burning the vafurs’) – antecedent to the Islamic Republic’s opium-burning ceremonies – to which foreign dignitaries would participate, praising their moral prohibitionist effort.Footnote ⁶¹ In its manifesto, this society declared, ‘it seems that the question of the effects of opium and alcohol has reached a point where the extinction of the Iranian race and generation will take place … In the name of the protection of the nationality, this committee has been created’.Footnote ⁶² This mixture of Persian nationalism and sense of crisis tainted the official discourse on drugs and pushed lawmakers to adopt tough measures on drug consumption.

The Society’s stance on drugs ignored the extent to which opium was part of the cultural norms and everyday customs of Iranians. Instead, it was instrumental in introducing legislations that targeted public intoxication among the popular classes. The new anti-drug propaganda described opium as a primary impediment to labour, although Iranian workers had traditionally used opium for its tonic effect.Footnote ⁶³ Coincidently, the government issued, first, a ban on the fifteen-minute work break for opium smokers, and then circulated a communiqué pointing out that ‘workers should not use opium on their jobs’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Employment of officials had to be based on their avoidance of opium use, a behaviour that could have cost them their place at work.Footnote ⁶⁵ Modernisation of the national economy, which had to move conjunctly with social behaviour, passed through the progressive abandoning of opium in favour of other habits, such as alcoholic drinks. The teriyaki was inherently weak and its place in the post-1941 public discourse condemned as underserving. Associated with lying, the addict was unreliable in the workplace, a perception that was widespread in the rural as much as the urban centres.Footnote ⁶⁶

The new bureaucratic apparatuses of the state, bolstered by the ideological and logistical support of the US anti-narcotic officials endowed the Anti-Opium Society with unprecedented clout over this issue. On January 28, 1945, hence, a deputy from Hamadan, Hassan Ali Farmand, who had previously opposed the Opium Monopoly in 1928, introduced a bill for the total prohibition of cultivation of poppies and use of opium.Footnote ⁶⁷ Between 1941 and 1953, the Majles approved a number of legislative acts: the creation of a ‘coupon system’ for registered drug users; the prohibition of opium cultivation in 1942–43; a ban on opium consumption in August 1946 under Prime Minister Ahmad Qavam, which lasted only ten months; and, under the government of Mohammad Mosaddeq (1951–53), a law amendment banning production, purchase and sale of opium and its derivatives and the consumption of alcoholic drinks.Footnote ⁶⁸ Over this period the government declared a war on coffeehouses, which were either to be closed or to cover up the use of opium within the building; enforcement of laws against public intoxication (tajahor) incremented, enshrining a legal framing which would prove durable up to the new millennium.

Prohibitionist rhetoric gained further momentum during the oil nationalization under Mosaddeq when the parliament voted unanimously to ban alcohol and opium use within six months.Footnote ⁶⁹ The move, however, was largely a populist tactic to gather support (including that of the clergy: alcohol ban) at a time when economic sanctions and international isolation were crippling the life of Iranians. Even government officials had very little belief in the effectiveness of this law. Asked by a journalist whether one could get a drink in Tehran six months from the entry in force of the law, a government official laughed and responded, ‘Yes, and six years from now, too’.Footnote ⁷⁰ At the same time, with state finances shrinking because of the stalemate in the oil industry, Mossadegh, in agreement with the Majles, had pushed for a steady increase in opium production in order to compensate for the drop in oil exports. The strategy had its limited results and ‘the government reported opium revenues of over 200 million rials a year from 1951 to 1954, about 20 percent of the total’.Footnote ⁷¹ In 1952, the United Nations accused Iran together with Communist China of smuggling opium, following a period of poor cooperation between the country and the US-led international drug control regime.Footnote ⁷² The British government also attempted to delegitimise the nationalist government in Tehran, ahead of the planned coup, by, among other methods, ‘spreading the rumor that Mosaddeq reeked of opium and “indulged freely” in that drug’.Footnote ⁷³ But, paradoxically, while the United States and the United Kingdom planned to topple Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, the United States purchased, both legally and illegally, large amounts of Iranian opium, out of the fear that the ‘Soviet bomb’ and the outbreak of a nuclear confrontation amid the Korean War (1950–53) would bring unprecedented levels of casualties.Footnote ⁷⁴ Opiates endured as the global painkiller, while the Cold War mentality required the primacy of strategic calculi over other diplomatic objectives, including that of international drug control.Footnote ⁷⁵

Opium Prohibition and Westoxification: (1955–69)

With the CIA-orchestrated coup d’état that brought Mohammad Reza Pahlavi back to the peacock throne, the United States gained greater influence over Iran’s domestic politics. For the FBN and its chief Anslinger, this meant that Iran had to become a global model of the prohibitionist regime. The decision to cooperate with Washington’s in fieri War on Drugs, writes Ryan Gingeras, provided an essential model for future agreements, ‘should America’s global campaign against narcotics proceed successfully’.Footnote ⁷⁶

Jahan Saleh, Minister of Health under Mohammad Reza Shah, promotor of the ban, conceded that, ‘Prohibition [of opium] was motivated by prestige reasons. At a time of modernization, which in most developing countries means imitation of Western models, the use of opium was considered a shameful hangover of a dark Oriental past. It did not fit with the image of an awakening, Westernizing Iran that the Shah was creating’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Prohibition worked instrumentally in the securitisation of domestic politics, while it steadily aligned the monarchy with the US-led camp. Thus, in November 1955, Jahan Saleh pushed for the approval of the Law Prohibiting Poppy cultivation and Opium Use. He argued that there were around 1.5 million drug addicts out of a population of 19 million.Footnote ⁷⁸ Given the embeddedness of the opium economy and culture, the legislative process encountered obstacles from a variety of social groups, such as coffeeshop owners, opium traders, apothecaries, landowners in poppy-cultivated regions and those who thought that the poppy was an inalienable part of Persian culture and backbone of its people’s economy.Footnote ⁷⁹ Yet, the public perception of drug (ab)use as a social liability and danger to people’s health outplayed the economic benefits of the poppy. Reports were widespread that the number of opiate (ab)users – the term used was inevitably ‘addict’ – had reached two million; in areas such as Gorgan, the Caspian region, it was said that 90 per cent to 100 per cent of the population was addicted (addiction in these cases probably signifying opium consumers).Footnote ⁸⁰ Evidently, some exaggeration was at play and instrumental in causing a public crisis about opium, a feature that would prove long lasting.Footnote ⁸¹

In his speech in front of the Senate, the proposer of the prohibition bill, Jahan Saleh, first downplayed the financial value of opium for the economy, then made clear that the health of people had no monetary price and that ‘people’s productivity would consequently increase by hundredfold’.Footnote ⁸² This did not convince his opponents, who requested the bill to be discussed in all the relevant committees, which were numerous. The request however was rejected by senator Mehdi Malekzadeh, who with emphatic sentiment and a trembling voice, reacted, ‘I am a staunch supporter of this bill, I know every bit of it, there is not a single section of this bill that does not have a financial or judicial aspect, but this is a health bill and when confronted with health questions other questions have no value. This is a bill on the lives and wellbeing of people’.Footnote ⁸³ By prioritising the public health dimension of the opium crisis, the proponents intended to bypass challenging political questions. After all, health crises are moments of reconfiguration of the political and social order.

Following the debate, the bill passed to the Majles, which approved it and added to its text an article on the prohibition of alcohol sale and procurement, much to the astonishment of the royal court and the modernist elites. Negotiations ensued to remove reference to alcohol; the Shah himself, during a meeting with the members of parliament, stated that ‘one of the significant undertakings that have been made is the outset of the fight against opium, which must be fulfilled with attention’, leaving out any reference to the issue of alcohol and spirits.Footnote ⁸⁴ By October 30, 1955, the text was amended in reference to alcohol and approved as the ‘Law on Prohibition of Poppy Cultivation and Opium Use’.Footnote ⁸⁵ The law envisaged heavy penalties for producers, traffickers and consumers. If found with fifty grams of opium or one gram of any other narcotic, the offender could face up to ten years of solitary confinement, and later the death sentence. For the ‘addict’, a six-month period of grace was conceded to kick her/his habit. Opium use in public places, such as cafes and hotels, could incur hefty fines and between six months to one year imprisonment, with recidivists seeing the weight of the sentence increased.Footnote ⁸⁶ It was a moral onslaught accompanied with the machinery of policing, which caused a drastic rise in the adulteration of opium, causing, according to an observer, ‘deleterious effects’ on consumers.Footnote ⁸⁷

The target of this new policy was not the international drug networks that operated throughout Iran. Instead, subaltern groups, such as paupers, sex workers, vagrant mendicants and members of tribes that operated smuggling routes, paid the highest price, in the guise of prison and stigmatisation. It is no coincidence that the institutionalisation of a national system of incarceration took place during these years.Footnote ⁸⁸ The prison regime did not specifically punish drug consumption by that time; rather it focused on inebriation and the breach of public morality, with an emphasis on other drugs such as hashish, understood as heterodox by the religious establishment and ‘left leaning’ by the police, similarly to how FBN director Harry J. Anslinger regarded cannabis as the drug of the perverted jazz milieu.Footnote ⁸⁹ Two years after the entry into force of the law, the government had to declare an amnesty for drug offenders, because of the overcrowding of the facilities. Shahab Ferdowsi, then advisor to the Ministry of Justice, revealed that ‘poor people are paying the price of this policy’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Imposed as a modernising programme, prohibition targeted those categories that were at odds with the Pahlavi view of what Iranian society should look like. That meant targeting – unsystematically – a good many outside the modernist city-dwellers.

The state discourse promoted, by indirect means, ‘useful delinquency’ as opposed to political opposition, the effects of which can be seen in Tehran thugs’ participation during the coup against Mossadegh.Footnote ⁹¹ The words of Michel Foucault come timely for this claim: ‘Delinquency solidified by a penal system centred upon the prison, thus represents a diversion of illegality for the illicit circuits of profit and power of the dominant class’.Footnote ⁹² It is clear that the creation of a moral public, whether in political terms (anti-Communism, Westernised), or in social terms (productive, healthy and law-abiding), was among the central concerns of the Pahlavi state, while at the same time it was also a tactical expedient. Besides, there was also ‘appetite for medicine’.Footnote ⁹³ The Bulletin of Narcotics reports, ‘Iran, in a special programme inaugurated in November 1955, established treatment centres in its several provinces to provide withdrawal and short-term rehabilitation for addicts’.Footnote ⁹⁴ But it later adds, ‘those addicts who are convicted of crime usually receive no special treatment, and are sent to prison as are other law violators’.Footnote ⁹⁵ In the words of the Iranian Minister of Health Amir Hossein Raji, the objective was:

The discretion of treatment, the diagnosis of curability and the necessity of punishment coalesced in the governance of illicit drugs. The stated formed new powers in the terrain of social control, citizens’ well-being and public health. In 1959, the law was further tightened, outlawing the possession of poppy seeds with punishments of up to three years, despite these seeds being widely used in foodstuff, including bread.Footnote ⁹⁷ Beside the heavy sentences, the prohibitionist regime of 1955 reproduced itself by funnelling the monies generating by drug confiscations (including property) to the anti-narcotic machinery.Footnote ⁹⁸ By the early 1960s, the government was allocating a five million dollar budget for anti-narcotics, while the United States provided around 250,000 USD for Iran’s contribution to international drug control, including military hardware, planes, helicopters and training.Footnote ⁹⁹ It is evident how anti-narcotics went hand in hand with the expansion of the intelligence service: in 1957, coincidentally, Garland Williams, one of the influential FBN supervisors, arrived in Tehran to set up a narcotic squad, while the CIA and the Mossad were establishing the SAVAK, Iran’s infamous secret service.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Concomitant to the militarisation of the drug assemblage (here an anti-narcotic assemblage), in 1961, a cabinet decree re-instated the capital penalty for those engaging in drug trafficking following the signing of the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs (1961). The international agreement ‘exhorted signatory states to introduce more punitive domestic criminal laws that punished individuals for engagement in all aspects of the illicit drug trade, including cultivation, manufacture, possession, transportation, sale, import, export or use of controlled drugs for non-medical purposes’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The international drug control machinery advised governments to incarcerate users; it also threatened to apply an embargo against those countries which held non-transparent attitudes on illicit drugs.

Over this period, the number of sentences in Iran increased substantially, concomitantly with the announcement of the state-led ‘White Revolution’ in 1963. Announced by the Shah as the new deal for Iranian agriculture, the reform sought to overhaul the century-old pattern of land possession and cultivation. Beside manoeuvring limited land redistribution to middle and small land-owners, the White Revolution facilitated the creation and expansion of large agribusiness, at detriment of all other cultivators. Mohammad Reza Shah’s call for social renewal found large-scale opposition, led by sections of the clergy, including Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The protest went down in history under the name of the ‘June 5 Revolt (Panzdah-e Khordad)’. It was severely repressed and Khomeini was sent into exile, the start of a long journey that would see him return to Iran only in February 1979. In his book, Islamic Government, Khomeini also writes about the Shah’s approach to illicit drugs and the adoption of the death sentence for drug offences:

More royalist than the king, more catholic than the pope, the Iranian state was also more prohibitionist than the leader of drug prohibition, the United States. The authorities turned this model into a special Iranian fetish, a model for the supporters of ever-harsher punishments against drug consumers worldwide. The side effects surfaced promptly. With harsher punishments against opium (and drugs in general), harder drugs gained popularity, with their accessibility, too, widening. As an old drug policy motto says, ‘the harder the enforcement, the harder the drugs’. With stricter control, harder drugs became available to the public at the expense of traditional drugs such as opium, a rationale that goes also under the name of the ‘Iron Law of Prohibition’.Footnote ¹⁰³ In 1957, two years after the entry into force of the prohibition, a man was hospitalised for heroin abuse after being found in the Tehran’s Mehran Gardens.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ It is the first reported case of heroin ‘addiction’ in Iranian history. The appearance of heroin signalled the changing social life of drugs over this period and in the following years.

Heroin was more difficult to detect, easier to transport for long distances, more lucrative with higher margins of profit and at the same time, with a much stronger effect than opium. It required no specific space for its use and, unlike opium, did not have a strong smell, which could attract unsolicited attention. Yet, heroin had no place in popular culture, neither as a medical nor recreational product and its repercussions on the user’s health were far more problematic than opium and shireh. If opium had an ambiguous status within Iran’s table of values and social habitus, being simultaneously medical, ritual and indigenous, heroin incarnated the intrusion of global consumption behaviours in the pursuit of pleasure and modernity.

By that time, the state regarded the question of ‘addiction’ as an epidemic that had to be isolated, as if it were cholera or the plague. Heroin instead instantiated, in the vision of the critics of the Pahlavi regime, a paradigmatic case of what intellectual Jalal Al-e Ahmad would call ‘Westoxification [gharbzadegi]’. The words of Jalal Al-e Ahmad, without referring to heroin directly, echoed the way heroin gained popularity among the urban modernist milieu. ‘Gharbzadegi is like cholera’, he writes, ‘a disease that comes from without, fostered in an environment made for breeding diseases’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The environment to which the author refers, was the modernisation programmes promoted by Mohammad Reza Shah during the 1960s and 70s, which, along with globalising trends in cities, produced a changing flow of time: faster transportation, less reliance on the land-based economy, exposure to Western industrial modes of consumption, with technology acquiring an ever-more-dominant role in people’s lives, and individuality as the meter of being in the world. Life changed, together with a change in epoch, and life, at least for those exposed more directly to these changes.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ To this contributed Shah’s so-called ‘White Revolution’ starting from 1963; the mass exodus from villages to urban centres, Tehran predominantly, signified an epochal change in the life of Iranians, at all levels, and the acquaintance with forms of sociability, consumption and recreation that differed substantially from that of rural communities. Inevitably, consumption patterns (including that of psychoactive, narcotic substances) changed in favour of modern substances.

According to Al-e Ahmad, Westoxification occurred through the impotency of indigenous models of consumption and production faced with Western supremacy in technology, industry and trade. Upper-class young people often embraced the nascent counterculture of the 1960s, where it also coincided with the ascent of heroin culture in Europe and North America. Heroin use in Iran did not enter into the practice of the ordinary people at least up to the end of the Pahlavi era, but remained a rather elitist pastime, given the higher price and its availability in urban areas.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Examples of this genre of life are provided by films such as Mohammad Ali Ja‘fari’s The Plague of Life, or Morphine (Afat-e Zendegi ya Morphine, 1960), which portrays the life and fall of a wealthy, modern(ist) man, Hamid, well-respected by family and society, and deceived by a beautiful cabaret singer (Shahla Rihali) to collaborate with a drug trafficking organisation, because once he injects morphine (or heroin), he is at the mercy of his dealers and meets all their requests just for another shoot. Hamid, who prior to the encounter with morphine used to wear impeccable black suits, suddenly metamorphoses into a southern Tehrani luti, with an unclean shirt and facetious mannerisms. From being a gifted classical piano player, he is transformed into a moustached baba karam, who drinks black tea and plays only folk music (Figure 2.2).Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Figure 2.2

Hamid before Morphine (left) and after (right)

During this period, the problem of drug (ab)use experienced an evolution and a complication. New drugs and new social groups entered the illegal economy, blurring the boundary of legality. Following the 1955 prohibition law, organised criminal groups entered into the world and mythology of Iran’s drugs politics. Secret laboratories mushroomed across the country, with the northwest Tabriz and Malayer, becoming a key production zone. Prohibition made the business of opiates highly profitable and persuaded groups of ordinary people who previously had little contact with the opium economy to set up production lines of morphine and heroin. In the police accounts, bakers, butchers and other ordinary workers used their workplace, house or farmhouse to produce amounts of opium derivatives and to sell it to traffickers.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ By using opium smuggled into Iran from Afghanistan, or morphine base coming southward from Turkey, ‘heroin chemists’ developed underground networks of procurement and production.Footnote ¹¹⁰ A contemporary commentator acknowledged that the process of transformation ‘is not more complex than making a bootleg of whiskey in the United States’, a similarity that recalls the early days of US prohibition and the production of moonshine. At times, heavy armed confrontations occurred, especially when the traffickers were members of tribes or Afghans. For example, in 1957, an eleven-hour shooting battle broke out between the Gendarmerie (in charge of anti-narcotics) and the Kakavand Tribe, in the Kurdish town of Kermanshah, leaving eighteen tribesmen dead and forty-five wounded.Footnote ¹¹¹ These outbursts of war-like violence heightened the sense of crisis that characterised the world of drugs, unprecedented for the Iranian public. Increased confrontation signified also that the financial bonanza of heroin trafficking had soon established international connections between local drug business and a transnational network of associates that reached the wealthy markets of the West.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. That is not the case for the Pahlavi state. At the time when FBN advisors advocated in favour of Iran’s ‘selfless effort’, the American intelligence was also well informed about the Shah’s acolytes’ role in the international narcotic trade.Footnote ¹¹² Gingeras reports that among the families directly involved in the narcotic affairs, apart from the Pahlavi, the CIA had mentioned the ‘Vahabzadeh, Ebtehajh, Namazee and Ardalan families’.Footnote ¹¹³ The shah’s twin sister, Princess Ashraf Pahlavi, had been allegedly involved in cases of narcotics trafficking and critics of the Pahlavi regime associated her with international criminal organisations. It was reported that in 1967, while on her way out of Geneva airport, Ashraf’s luggage was searched by the Swiss antinarcotics police, who allegedly found large amounts of heroin. Because of her diplomatic immunity, she was not prosecuted, but the international media covered the event in-depth, causing a scandal. Swiss and French newspapers spread the news about the incident, although official accounts have so far remained contested, especially by supporters of the Pahlavi monarchy. Ashraf sued Le Monde for these allegations and eventually won her libel case, having the story retracted.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Two other high-ranking officials had already been involved in a similar case. In 1960, the Swiss authorities warned of an Iranian national, Hushang Davvalu, suspected of shipping heroin into Europe. Ten years later, the police searched his house in Switzerland, where they found narcotics. Davvalu, who suffered from heart problems, was allowed to return home to Tehran.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Shah’s two brothers, too, were seemingly embroiled in the trafficking business. Hamid-Reza Pahlavi, the younger brother, is described in the account of the SAVAK as ‘having established in Takht-e Jamshid Street a headquarter, which used air companies to smuggle drugs, especially opium from outside the country into Iran, to produce heroin and then distribute it in Tehran and other cities’. The document describes also the involvement of high officials in the army who at times escorted the prince in his business trips. Hamid-Reza reached considerable fame to the point that the best heroin available in Tehran, in the 1960s, was known as heroin-e hamid-reza.Footnote ¹¹⁶

The other brother of the Shah, Mahmud-Reza, had also been caught up in the business. A bon vivant with a habit for opium and heroin, his relation with the Shah was strained and he was forbidden to participate in events at the royal court.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Since 1951, American officials have also been observing the movements and affairs of Mahmoud-Reza across the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. In February of that same year, Charles Siragusa, an experienced investigator of the FBN, spotted the prince ‘in a purple Cadillac with two beautiful women’ in Hamburg. The FBN discovered that Mahmud-Reza, under the alias Marmoud Kawa, smuggled heroin between Tehran, Paris, New York and Detroit, but the United States never followed up the lead in this case and instead arrested an Armenian associate of the prince, who operated a network, among whom were part also Iran’s counsels in Brussels and Cairo.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Thence, Iran’s diplomatic corps acquired the reputation of a drug trafficking network, despite attempts to cover up the scandals.

As previously said, US regional interest in the Middle East and the ongoing Cold War priorities prevented the FBN from disclosing the vast network of international heroin trafficking that operated under the Pahlavi family. The state itself remained in a paradoxical position: it hardened its drug laws, it militarised its drug control strategy and expanded its intelligence networks through anti-narcotic cooperation with the USA, but it acquiesced in not interfering with high-calibre heroin trafficking networks, often connected or known to the royal court. Iran became the regional machinery of US anti-narcotic strategy, through intelligence and information sharing, but also one of the main hubs for illegal narcotics in the region.Footnote ¹¹⁹

The means of enforcement of the drug laws improved steadily, the number of people punished for drug offenses increased dramatically, and prison populations reached unprecedented levels with administrative costs becoming a burden in budgetary allocations. Welfare for drug rehabilitation remained weak and the promise to uproot drugs from society sounded like a farce. In 1969, however, the government overturned the 1955 opium prohibition and established a regulated system of opium distribution and poppy cultivation. This occurred, most symbolically, when newly elected US president Richard Nixon declared the beginning of the ‘War on Drugs’.

Iranizing Prohibition?

The second half of twentieth century saw prohibition of drugs turning into a central issue in the global political debate. Intermingling of domestic and foreign affairs in drugs politics was the rule. Nixon’s call for a ‘War on Drugs’ influenced the discourse on illicit drugs across the globe. Indeed, US domestic politics had its leverage over international narcotics control. In his bid to win the US election, Richard Nixon had to defeat two enemies: the black voter constituency and the anti-war left, both galvanised by the vibrant movements of the late 1960s. As his former domestic policy advisor revealed in 2016, ‘we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities’.Footnote ¹²⁰

As the United States embraced a more systematic prohibition, its close ally the Shah seemed to go in another direction. Counter-intuitively, the Iranian government introduced a groundbreaking policy, which had few systematic precedents globally and which apparently defied, on its own terms, the prohibitionist regime. In 1969, the Iranian government re-introduced state-supervised poppy cultivation and opium production and, crucially, opium distribution programmes on a mass-scale. The move occurred for several reasons, the main being the refusal by Iran’s neighbours, Turkey, Afghanistan and Pakistan, to eradicate their local production of opium, most of which passed through Iran, with a considerable part of it being turned into smoke by Iranians. In the words of the former Minister of Health Saleh, ‘gold goes out, opium comes in’,Footnote ¹²¹ with capital flight becoming a serious threat to economic development. Payment for opium depleted the gold reserves over the 1960s. Moreover, the government sought to decrease the economic burden of its anti-narcotic strategy, which had caused hardships for families whose breadwinner had been incarcerated for drug offences. An eightfold increase in heroin confiscation occurred between 1964 and 1966, prompting the government to reconsider the feasibility and effectiveness of the prohibition of opium. Heroin, a more dangerous substance but easier to transport and to consume, had become popular among an increasing number of citizens.

The government considered the 1969 drug law reform as a fresh start for the country’s drug strategy. The judicial authorities granted amnesty to people condemned under the 1955 drug law and the government introduced a vast medical system of drug treatment and rehabilitation, a model that resembled in its vision the ‘British model’ of heroin maintenance, but which differed radically from it in its quantitative scope.Footnote ¹²² It also made the promise to the United States that Iran would reintroduce opium prohibition once Turkey and Afghanistan had done the same.Footnote ¹²³ But despite the Turkish ban on opium between 1969 and 1974 – which occurred under heavy US pressure on Ankara – poppy fields flourished undisturbed in Iran up to the fall of Shah in 1979.

The legendary ‘coupon system’, which is still recalled by many elderly Iranians, permitted the issue of vouchers to registered opium users. The new law granted consumption rights to two main groups. The first one was that of people over the age of sixty who would receive their ration after approval of a physician. The other group was that of people between the age of twenty and fifty-nine, who manifested medical, psychological symptoms for which opium could be used or who could not give up their opium use, for which the state assumed the responsibility to supply them with opium. The symptoms for which one could receive the coupon, included headache, rheumatism, back pain, depression, arthritis, etc., assessed by a governmental panel under the Ministry of Health. A consumer could purchase a daily dose of opium (between two and ten grams) from a licenced pharmacy or drug store.Footnote ¹²⁴ The GP or the pharmacy then issued an ID card with a photograph, personal particulars, the daily amount of opium, and the pharmacy from which he/she should secure the opium ration. The public had access to two kinds of opium. One of a lower standard, which the government took from opium seizures of illicit traffic, coming mostly from Afghanistan and to a lesser extent Pakistan, costing six rials per gram; and the other, known for its outstanding quality – sometimes recalled as senaturi (‘senatorial’) – produced in the state-owned poppy farms, priced at seventeen and a half rials per gram.Footnote ¹²⁵

With the comfort of guaranteed availability of opium, the registered user could walk to a convenient pharmacy and, at a price intended to annihilate the competition of the illegal market, purchase the highest quality of opium, worldwide. By 1972, there were about 110,000 registered people out of an estimated total population of ca. 400,000 opium users; in 1978, about 188,000 with 52 per cent of those registered under the age of sixty.Footnote ¹²⁶ Those who did not register could buy opium, illegally, from registered users, who often had amounts in excess of their need and could re-sell it, or access the illicit market of Afghan and Pakistani opium, which remained in place especially in rural areas. The figure of the ‘patient-pusher’ appeared in the narrative of opium,Footnote ¹²⁷ with an intergenerational mix where elderly opium users would register for the coupon in order to avoid younger users having to rely on the illegal market, or to make some marginal profit from reselling the coupons.Footnote ¹²⁸ To have opium at home, after all, was part of the customs of greeting hosts and a sine qua non in areas such as Kerman, Isfahan and Mashhad.Footnote ¹²⁹

The illegal market did not disappear overnight; in areas in which the state had limited presence, people kept on relying on their networks. People living in villages, for instance, witnessed very little change after the 1969 policy or, for that matter, any previous policy. Distances were great, physicians few and distribution networks weak. Women, too, had a tendency not to register (although they did in some case), mostly due to the negative perception of female opium smokers, especially when young.Footnote ¹³⁰ The public perception was that working classes registered for the coupons, given that opium dispensaries stood in less wealthy areas, especially in Tehran. In reality, bourgeois classes benefited from the distribution network too. But only a small proportion of the total population registered.

Treatment and rehabilitation facilities were also insufficient. The main hospital for the treatment of drug abuse in Tehran, the Bimarestan-e Mo‘tadan (Addicts’ Hospital), had only 150 beds in 1970, while in the rest of the country lack of infrastructures was even more blatant.Footnote ¹³¹ The private sector provided treatment services, including psychiatric and psychological support, but mainly addressed the urban bourgeois class, who could afford their higher fees.Footnote ¹³² The oil boom of the early 1970s – the grand leap forward of Iranian politico-economics – produced limited effects on state intervention. The majority of registered users were in the urban centres of the north, in particular in Tehran and the Caspian region, whereas areas with a historical connection to opium and the poppy economy had significantly lower numbers of registered patients (see Kerman). People with access to opium without the mediation of the state opted for the illegal market.

By the mid -1970s, drugs and politics intertwined because the royal court had firstly been accused of operating an illegal network of drug trafficking and, now, had become the main legitimate provider of narcotics to the population (Table 2.2). Socially and culturally, the presence of drugs was also conspicuous. The International Conference of Medicine, which took place in the northern city of Ramsar in 1971, dedicated its entire convention to the issue of addiction. Its proceedings advised the government to ban poppy cultivation or to keep it at a minimum required for essential medical needs for the certified drug addicts. Moreover, it suggested stopping the coupon system out of the risk of opium diversion to the general population and the widespread over-prescription practiced by doctors.Footnote ¹³³ The government refused to take either of these suggestions and the coupon system lived up to the days of the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

The 1969 drug law, however, was not dissonant with global prohibitionist discourse. Since the 1920s, UK doctors had prescribed heroin to patients who were dependent on the substance. In 1967, the Ministry of Health instructed doctors to continue this practice to prevent the spread of heroin trafficking in the UK, despite increasing pressures against it.Footnote ¹³⁴ The model allowed an opiate abuser to seek medical support in special clinics, housed in hospitals and under the supervision of psychiatrists. The fundamental difference in the 1970s was the quantitative dimension of the Iranian programme, which numbered hundreds of thousands of people, compared to the UK model which accounted for a mere 342 in 1964.Footnote ¹³⁵ Similarly to the UK, addiction was reframed as a disability and not simply a disease, with its consequences bypassing the simple individual and being borne by family and society.Footnote ¹³⁶ The Iranian government made the National Iranian Society for Rehabilitation of the Disabled the institution in charge of treatment and maintenance of drug users.Footnote ¹³⁷ In this regard, the programme was not a niche attempt to control a marginal population, but a vast societal endeavour with the purpose of addressing a public health concern. Neither it was a move towards drug legalisation or comprehensive medicalisation of the drug use. Instead, it embodied a different form of prohibition, the effect of which touched mostly on poorer communities.

The 1969 law disposed that drug trafficking crimes needed to be judged, not by civilian courts, but by military courts. This upgrading of the security sensitivity on the narcotic issue can be partly interpreted as the Shah’s signal to his closest ally, the United States, of Iran’s sincere pledge to stop the flow of heroin; and partly as a means to buttress coercive means against those operating in a terrain which was exclusively the turf of the state, namely opium production.Footnote ¹³⁸ A CIA memorandum reported that ‘Tehran has embarked on a stringer smuggling eradication program’, with more than ninety smugglers executed between 1969 and 1971.Footnote ¹³⁹ In 1975, it was estimated that there were 6,000 prisons spread throughout Iran, with drug offenders being still the largest population.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Instead of establishing a system of regulation, with an underlying non-prohibitionist mindset, the Iranian state adopted a double form of intervention aimed ultimately at the exclusive control of the narcotic issue by itself, both on domestic distribution and production. In practice, competing groups with close ties to the state – one could call them the rhizomes of the state? – such as corrupted elements of the court, transnational elites connected to smugglers, and drug producers inside and outside Iran outplayed the state’s drug strategy to their own benefit.

Conclusions

Timothy Mitchell writes that ‘the essence of modern politics is not policies formed on one side of this division being applied to or shaped by the other, but the producing and reproducing of these lines of difference’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ In this regard, Mitchell’s historicisation is reminiscent of Foucault’s genealogical approach: it is not a ‘quest for the origins of policies or values, neither is ‘its duty to demonstrate that the past actively lives in the present’.Footnote ¹⁴² The task of genealogy, paraphrasing the French philosopher, is to record the history of unstable, incongruent and discontinuous events into a historical process that makes visible all of those discontinuities that cut across state and society.Footnote ¹⁴³ This chapter traced a genealogy of prohibition in modern Iran and its relation to the process of modern state formation. The birth of the drug control machinery in Iran dates back to the aftermath of the Constitutional Revolution (1906–11) and forms part of the wider global inception of prohibitionist policies in the early twentieth century. Sponsored by the United States, the Shanghai Conference in 1909 represented a first global effort to draw homogenising lines of behaviour (sobriety, temperance, order: legibility) – haphazardly – into the body politic of the world system. Opium, as such, symbolised an anti-modern element, a hindrance in the modernisation destiny of any country. Opium, and addiction as its governmental paradigm, embodied a life handicapped by dependence, impotency, apathy and above all, slavery. Within a matter of decades, the adoption of this discourse produced apparatuses of narcotic control and prohibition. Accordingly, Iran went through a period of inconsistent experimentation, both for the state as a governmental machinery, and the people as interlocutors of and experimenters with the phenomenon of illegal drugs. In detailing these processes, the chapter unmasked the Pahlavi state’s relation to social and political modernisation through an analysis of this period’s drugs politics. This setting provided the contextual prelude to subsequent socio-political and cultural transformations that accompanied and followed the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

In the opium popular mythology, an apocryphal story narrates the discontinuities described at the close of this chapter. Four public officials, connoisseurs of opium (tariyak shenas) and professional opium users (herfei), would go every morning in the Opium Desk within the Office of the Treasury (dara’i) to test the quality of the state opium, before attaching the government banderole to those opium cakes up to standard for national distribution. With the revolution in 1979 and the closure of the Opium Desk, all four of them died because of khomari (hangover for the lack of opium).Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Introduction

‘Give me three months and I will solve the problem of addiction in this country’, declared the newly appointed head of the Anti-Narcotics Bureau in Tehran, Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali on the eve of the victory of the Islamic Revolution.Footnote ¹ The ousting of the Shah and the coming to power of the revolutionaries had profound effects on the ideas, policies and visions that the Iranian state had vis à vis illicit drugs and addiction. Narcotics, in the eyes of the revolutionary state, did not simply embody a source of illegality, physical and psychological deviation and moral depravity, as was the case for the Pahlavi regime during its prohibitionist campaigns. Narcotics were agents of political and, indeed, counter-revolutionary value/vice to which the new political order had to respond with full force and determination. In times of revolution, there was no place for drug consumption. Criticism against the previous political establishment – and its global patron, the United States – adopted the lexicon of anti-narcotic propaganda; the idea of addiction itself, in some ways similarly to what had happened during the 1906–11 Constitutional Revolution, implied sympathy for the ancien régime of the Shahs and their corrosive political morality.

Under this rationale the period following 1979 saw the systematic overturning of policies laying at the foundation of the Pahlavi’s drug control strategy in the decade preceding the revolution. But it would be incomplete to describe the developments over the 1980s as a mere about-face of previous approaches. The Islamic Republic undertook a set of interventions that speak about the intermingling of drugs and politics in the context of epochal events in Iranian history, especially that of the eight-year war with Iraq and the transition from revolutionary to so-called pragmatic politics. This chapter explores the techniques that the revolutionary state adopted to counter the perceived threat of narcotic (ab)use and drug trafficking. Three major moments characterise this period: the revolutionary years (1979–81), the war years (1981–8) and the post-war years (1988–97).

Tabula Rasa: the Islamic Paladin Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali

On 27 June 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini declared, ‘drugs are prohibited’;Footnote ² their trafficking, consumption and ‘promotion’ were against the rules of Islam and could not take place in the Islamic Republic. This ruling, although informal in nature, sanctioned a swift redirection of Iran’s previous approach to narcotic drugs, in terms of both control and consumption. As had happened in 1955, Iran seemed ready to go back to a policy of total prohibition and eradication of opiates, this time under the banner of Islam rather than that of the international drug control regime. It was not the concern of alignment with international conventions of drug control that guided the decision of the Iranian leaders, but rather the obligation to build a body politic detoxified of old habits, enshrined in a new ethics of sobriety in politics as well as in everyday life. This revolutionary vision had to come to terms with the existing programmes of opium maintenance and treatment started in 1969. What was going to be the lot of the registered opium users under the Pahlavi coupon system? In the zeitgeist of the first years of the revolution, between the return of Ayatollah Khomeini in February 1979 and the outbreak of the war in September 1980, the question acquired sensitive political value well beyond the technical considerations of medical management and opium production. Illicit drugs and their consumption reified a field of political contention and intervention, which went hand in hand with the legitimacy and vision of the newly established Islamic Republic and which would have lasting presence in its political transformation in later years.

On 25 August 1979, Iran’s interim president Mehdi Bazargan, who espoused a liberal orientation for the new political order, signed the ministerial cabinet act giving permission to registered opium users to purchase opium from the state at a fixed rate of thirty rials. The concession was meant to be an exceptional permission lasting for a period of six months, after which all opium users were required to kick their habit. Those who continued to use opium would have to rely on the black market and would be considered criminals. But given that Khomeini had already declared that the poppy had to be eradicated from all cultivated lands, the government allowed the Opium Transaction Organisation (Sazman-e mo‘amelat-e tariyak) – previously charged with the approval and provision of opium ‘coupons’ – to purchase a hundred tons of opium from India, a major legitimate producer of pharmaceutical opium.Footnote ³ Intended to assist those who had been under the previous regulated opium distribution system, the one-off transaction enabled the new political order to find alternatives in the field of drugs policy. Ayatollah Sadegh-e Khalkhali best emblematised the vision of this new model.

A mid-ranking cleric loyal to Ayatollah Khomeini prior the revolution, the Imam appointed Khalkhali as Iran’s first hakem-e shar‘, the leading state prosecutor. Just a few days after the victory of the revolutionary camp against the Shah, in mid-February, Khalkhali had taken up the demanding post of Islamic Robespierre.Footnote ⁴ Unsettled by the burdensome appointment, Khalkhali wrote to Khomeini, ‘I am thankful, but this job has blood and it is very demanding … I fear that my name [‘face’, chehreh] in the history of the revolution will be stained in blood and that the enemies of Islam will propagate [stories] against me, especially since I will need to judge the perpetrators of vice and corruption and crime in Iran’.Footnote ⁵ The assessment of his predicament, indeed, was correct, and Khalkhali’s name remained associated with the reign of terror of the revolution. As the supreme judge heading the Revolutionary Courts, Khalkhali fulfilled the task of annihilating the old guard of the Pahlavi regime in a reign of terror that also represented the cathartic moment of the revolution. What often goes unmentioned is that at the same time Abolhassan Bani Sadr, Iran’s first elected president, nominated Khalkhali as the first head of the Bureau of Anti-Narcotics.Footnote ⁶ Prohibition of drugs (and alcohol) became a new religion, with its punitive apparatuses of inquisitions. Khalkhali’s duty as Iran’s drug tsar lasted less than one year, but its effects were historically and genealogically profound.

Under Khalkhali, Iranian authorities eradicated the poppy crop for the first time in the country’s modern history. The endeavour, promised at different historical stages equally by Iranian Constitutionalists, anti-drug campaigners, the Shah and the United States, was eventually carried out with no international support in a matter of two years. After having called on producers to cultivate ‘moral crops’ such as wheat, rice and lentils, the authorities banned opium production on 26 January 1980.Footnote ⁷ Khomeini declared ‘smuggling’ and ‘trafficking’ haram, a statement which had no precedent in Islamic jurisprudence, and which signalled a shifting attitude and new hermeneutics among the clerical class.Footnote ⁸ Along with him, prominent clerics expressed their condemnation of drug use in official fatwas. Up until then Islamic jurisprudence had remained ambivalent on opium, maintaining a quietist mode of existence about its consumption.

Khalkhali personally oversaw the files of the convicted drug offenders in collective sessions. In several instances, charges against political opponents were solidified with accusation of involvement in drug dealing or drug use, thus making manifest the narratives, mythologies and suspicions that had characterised anti-Shah opposition during the 1970s. For instance, the prosecutors accused the leftist guerrilla movement of the Fadayan-e Khalq of harbouring massive amounts of opium (20 tons), heroin (435 kg) and hashish (2742 kg) in its headquarters, a finding that led to the execution (and public delegitimation) of the group apparatchik.Footnote ⁹ Similarly, high-ranking officials of the previous regime were found guilty of mofsed-fil-‘arz, ‘spreading corruption on earth’, a theological charge that contemplated as its prime element the involvement in narcotics trafficking, drug use and broadly defined ‘debauchery’.Footnote ¹⁰

Within this scenario, one can locate the role of revolutionary tribunals, heir to the Shah’s military tribunals, now headed by Khalkhali in the purification process. These courts judged drug cases together with crimes against the state, religion and national security, as well as those of prostitution, gambling and smuggling. Revolutionary courts brought public executions and TV confessions to prominence and into the societal eye as a means to legitimise the new political order and deter deviance from it. Khalkhali’s role in this narrative was central: as head of the Anti-Narcotics Bureau he was a regular presence in the media, with his performance being praised for its relentless and merciless engagement against criminals. On special occasions, he would personally visit large groups of drug addicts arrested by the Islamic Committees and Gendarmerie and gathered in parks and squares. Those arrested had their hair shaved in the middle and on the sides of the head, a sign of humiliation in a manner combining pre-modern punishment with modern anti-narcotics stigmatisation. A person’s appearance as a ‘drug addict’ would land him/her a criminal charge, with confiscation of drugs not being strictly necessary for condemnation. In video footage taken during one of Khalkhali’s visit, a man, one of the arrested offenders, says, ‘I am 55 years old and I am an addict, but today I was going to the public bath – everyone knows me here – I had no drugs on me, I was taken here for my appearance [qiyafeh]. No to that regime [the Pahlavi]! Curse on that regime, which reduced us to this’.Footnote ¹¹ His justification hints at two apparently inconsistent points: he pleads guilty to being an addict, but also a person who did not commit any crime on that day; and he puts the burden of his status on the political order that preceded Khalkhali’s arrival, that of the Pahlavis.

The fight against narcotics and, in the rhetoric of this time, against its faceless patrons of mafia rings, international criminals and imperialist politicians produced what Michel Foucault defined in Discipline and Punish ‘the daily bulletin of alarm or victory’, in which the political objective promised by the state is achievable in the short term, but permanently hindered by the obscure forces that undermine the revolutionary zeal (Figure 3.1).Footnote ¹² As an Islamic paladin in a jihad (or crusade) against narcotics, Khalkhali applied heavy sentences, including long-term incarceration and public execution, against drug traffickers involved at the top and bottom of the business hierarchy. He also targeted commercial activities involved, laterally, in the trade, including truck drivers, travellers’ rest stations (bonga-ye mosaferin), coffeehouses, and travel agencies.Footnote ¹³ Confiscation of the personal possessions of the convicted to the benefit of the law enforcement agencies or the Foundation of the Addicts (bonyad-e mo‘tadan) was standard practice. The Foundation, instead, dispensed the funds for detoxification programmes and medical assistance, most of which had a punitive character.Footnote ¹⁴ Albeit celebrated by some, Khalkhali’s modus operandi fell outside the legalistic and procedural tradition of Islamic law, especially regarding matters of confiscation of private property and the use of collective sentences. To this criticism, however, he responded with revolutionary zeal: ‘On the Imam’s [Khomeini] order, I am the hakem-e shar‘ [the maximum judge] and wherever I want I can judge!’Footnote ¹⁵

Figure 3.1

Awareness Campaign in Etela’at May 8, 1980

Again, as in 1910s and then 1950s, the Iranian state preceded American prohibitionist efforts and their call for a War on Drugs. It was under the fervour of the Islamic revolution and the challenge to extirpate, in the words of public officials, ‘the cancer of drugs’, that Khalkhali undertook his mission. Counter-intuitively, this call anticipated the US President Ronald Regan’s pledge for a ‘drug free world’ in the 1980s. Anti-narcotic and reactionary religiosity animated the ideology of the Iranian and the American states, though at different ends of the spectrum.

On the occasion of the execution of a hundred drug traffickers, Khalkhali declared: ‘I have nothing to do with addiction, I deal with the fight against drugs, in this fight I confiscate their opium, I tear up their coupons; now whatever the government intends to do is none of my business’.Footnote ¹⁶ Yet, his undertakings did not go without criticism; widespread accusations of corruption among his anti-narcotic officials and ambiguity over the boundaries of his powers tarnished his image as an Islamic paladin. Allegations of torture against drug (ab)users and mass trials with no oversight cast a shadow on the other side of ‘revolutionary justice’.Footnote ¹⁷ On May 12, 1980, three months after his appointment, Khalkhali submitted his resignation, which was initially refused by then-president Bani Sadr, who had to clarify in the newspaper Enqelab-e Eslami what the ‘limits of Khalkhali’s duties’ were.Footnote ¹⁸ By December of that same year, however, Khalkhali resigned from his post amid harsh criticism from the political cadres and fear throughout society.Footnote ¹⁹

His methods had broken many of the tacit and explicit conventions of Iranian culture, such as the sanctity of the private space of the house and a respectful demeanour towards strangers and elderly people. His onslaught against drugs, initially welcomed by the revolutionary camp at large, terrorised people well beyond the deviant classes of drug (ab)users and the upper elites of the ancien régime. Traditional households, pious in the expression of their religiosity as much as conservative in respect of privacy and propriety, had seen anti-narcotic officials intervening in their neighbourhoods in unholy and indignant outbursts. The disrespect of middle class tranquillity animating Khalkhali’s anti-drug campaign prompted Khomeini’s intervention on December 29, 1980. Aimed at moderating the feverish and uncompromising tone and actions of his delegate judge, Khomeini stated: ‘Wealth is a gift from God’ in a major public updating of revolutionary fervour. The eight-point declaration had to set the guidelines for the new political order:

This statement also coincided with the dismissal of Khalkhali as head of anti-narcotics and the appointment of two mid-ranking clerics in his stead. The means of eradication of narcotics shifted with Khalkhali’s withdrawal from the drug battle. It also contributed a change in the phenomenon of illicit drugs.

The Imposed Wars: Iraq and Drugs (1980–88)

The Iraqi invasion of the southwestern oil-rich region of Khuzestan exacerbated the already faltering security on the borders, leaving the gendarmerie and the police in disarray. Easier availability of illicit drugs coincided with a qualitative shift. The trend that had started during the 1960s, which had seen upper-class Iranians acquiring a taste for heroin, was democratised in the years following the revolution, also as an effect of urbanisation. Despite Khalkhali’s total war on drugs, his means had remained ineffective and fragmentary, and his strategy relied on fear and the unsystematic searches for drugs. The prospect of eradication of illicit drugs in this ecology, with opium geographically and historically entrenched, was unrealistic. It soon coincided with the spread of heroin within Iran’s borders.

With tougher laws on drug trafficking, heroin had a comparative advantage on opium and other illegal substances. It was harder to detect both as a smuggled commodity and as a consumed substance. It guaranteed a much higher return on profits with smaller quantities, with European markets keeping up the demand for all the 1980s. Clinical records from this period point at a generational, geographical shift in the phenomenon of drugs: a majority of younger urban-origin (including recently urbanised) groups shifted to heroin smoking, with rural elderly people maintaining the opium habit.Footnote ²¹ In the absence of reliable data, this shift suggests a fall in the cost of heroin, whereas prior to 1979 heroin had remained an elitist habit. On the eastern front, the insurgency in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan had resulted in skyrocketing poppy production, with very large quantities of opium and refined heroin making their way through Iran. The sale of opiates across the world, and their transit through Iran, financed the mujahedin fight against the Red Army, a business model allegedly facilitated by the CIA in a bid to bog down the Soviet Union into a new Vietnam. Without adequate intelligence and with the bulk of the army and volunteer forces occupied on the Western front against Iraq, Iran’s War on Drugs had to rely on a different strategy.Footnote ²²

By end of 1981, the Islamic Republic faced several crises: the invasion of its territories by Iraq (September 1980), the US embassy hostage crisis (November 1979–January 1981), the dismissal of the elected president Bani Sadr (June 20, 1981), and the concomitant purges carried out by Ayatollah Khalkhali since 1979. Heroin was not top on the agenda of the revolutionaries, but, by the 1980s, it turned into a visible trait of urban life. Its devastating effects were undeniable in the post-war period.

The authorities could not establish a new moral order free of narcotics. Hence, they recalibrated their focus towards the war and clamped down on political deviancy. Vis-à-vis drugs, the government’s rationale became governing the crisis through different sets of techniques. These techniques intermingled with those of the war front, buttressing the interpretation of the anti-narcotic fight as a second ‘imposed war’ (jang-e tahmili), the first one being Saddam Hussein’s invasion backed by imperialist forces. The Central Islamic Committee formulated the legal framework of both the war against Iraq and the war against drugs in November 1981 (Table 3.1). The Committee assigned the duty of drug control programmes to ‘Headquarters’ (setad) and their regional representatives, operating in direct contact line with the government executive. The law punished possession of quantities over one kg of opiates by the death sentence, even on the first offence; then it applied the death sentence also for minor repeated offences (more than three offences). Addiction, per se, was a criminal offence even without possession of drugs, a legal interpretation object of polemics up until the late 2010s.

This period also brought with it the imprimatur of later years and, as such, has genealogical value. Repressive practices of drug control did not terminate suddenly; instead, a shift in their practice occurred under different disciplining priorities: keeping addiction ‘out of the public gaze’; mobilising societal elements in the fight against narcotics; integrating the rhetoric of conspiracy and suspicion into the war on drugs. One could see this shift as the transition from revolutionary zeal in favour of republican means.

The Quarantine

Once the six-month period allowing drug users to kick their habit came to an end, the priority became ‘to prevent addiction from being visible from the outside and from becoming a showcase [vitrini]’.Footnote ²³ Governing the crisis of drug use – and the management of public disorder – occurred through the quarantine. Hojjatoleslam Zargar, Khalkhali’s successor at the head of the Anti-Narcotics Bureau, remarked that ‘when arrested, the addict is considered a criminal and punished; then he is hospitalised and put under treatment and also condemned’.Footnote ²⁴ This combination of incarceration and forced treatment could be observed in the massive entry of drug (ab)users into the penal/welfare system. The number of people arrested for drug (ab)use increased from 19,160 in 1982 to 92,046 in 1988.Footnote ²⁵ The authorities set up state-run labour and detoxification centres across the country, some with the capacity to take in thousands. Conceived with little scientific acumen or medical knowledge, these centres forced interned people to work on land-reclaiming projects, construction sites and other manual activities while detoxifying. Their effectiveness would often depend on the skills and personality of the management cadres, driven mostly by amateur devotion rather than experience in treating addiction. Shurabad, located in southern Tehran, was to be the model of these centres. Here, lectures in ‘Islamic ideology’, sessions of collective prayer and forced labour would occupy the period of internment, which could last up to six months. Accounts of violence were numerous, with an unspecified, but considerable, number of deaths.Footnote ²⁶

Quarantine was also carried out through other techniques, the most emblematic being that of the ‘islands’. Drug (ab)users, especially the poor and homeless, would be sent to unpopulated islands in the Persian Gulf, the jazirah.Footnote ²⁷ Under extremely difficult physical and psychological conditions, they were forced into outdoor manual labour, in the desolated landscapes of the south. This ‘exile’ – indeed, the southern coast had been used in lieu of exile in modern Iranian history – enabled the authorities to cast off from the public space those unaligned with the ethical predicaments of the Islamisation project.

Quarantining drug (ab)users preserved the façade of moral purity and social order dear to the Islamist authorities and had also the objective of instilling fear into all drug consumers. Yet, by 1984, rather than a decline in drug use, categories hitherto thought of as pure and untouched by drugs seemed to be involved in it. In Mashhad, the local authorities inaugurated the first Women’s Rehabilitation Centre, while several hospitals across the country opened ad hoc sections for children dependant on opiates.Footnote ²⁸ This would often come as a side-effect of the husband/father’s opium smoking and/or the consequences of arrests, which inevitably caused hardships on poorer families and the resort to illegal means of economic sustenance, such as drug dealing, smuggling, and sex work. The most affected geographical areas were Khorasan, Baluchistan and the southern districts of Tehran. There, widespread drug (ab)use coexisted with the dominant position of drugs in the economy and, consequently, with the devastating effect of anti-narcotic operations on the local population. Heroin consumption increased even in rural communities once known only for opium and shireh smoking. A small village in Khorasan, for instance, was reported to have ‘118 of 150 families addicted to heroin’.Footnote ²⁹ The authorities associated public vagrancy with drug (ab)use, a feature of drug policy for the following decades. Several national campaigns against vagrants and street ‘addicts’ took place throughout the 1980s.Footnote ³⁰ While solidarity with the mosta‘zafin (downtrodden) was expressed in the public discourse, the authorities were also eager to reorganise the public space, Islamising its guise, a process which did not tolerate the unruly, undisciplined category of the homeless.

Not all the efforts were detrimental to marginalised communities. A study of clinical access to addiction treatment carried out in 1984 in the city of Shiraz indicates that ‘government clinics, after the revolution, are now seeing a broader range of addicts than before’.Footnote ³¹ The rural population and working class men visited the public clinics in larger percentages than prior to 1979, suggesting that the revolution’s welfarist dimension had its inroads into the treatment of addiction too. Treatment was to some extent socialised over the 1980s, but this was potentially a consequence of the changing pattern of drug (ab)use – rise in heroin use – and of the pressure of state criminalising policies towards drug (ab)users. In other words, access to treatment among poorer communities came as part of the long-term effect of Khalkhali’s shock therapy. Although public deviancy – embodied by drug (ab)use – undermined the ethical legitimacy of the Islamic Republic, the narrative of narcotics fell within the local/global nexus of revolution and imperialism. In this nexus, world power, the global arrogance (estekbar-e jahani), plotted to undermine the Islamic Republic through the Trojan horse filled with drugs.

Drug Paranoia and the Politics of Suspicion

‘Everyday drugs and in particular heroin are designed as part of a long term programme by the enemies of the revolution, who through a wide and expensive network aim at making young people addicted’.Footnote ³² Thus read the first page of the newspaper Jomhuri-ye Eslami on August 5, 1986. The War on Drugs was the second chapter of the ‘Imposed War’, the name which the Iranian leadership had used to describe the conflict with Saddam’s Iraq. Not only held up by the upper echelons of power, the population at large espoused this interpretation of drugs politics. The alignment of US and Soviet interests – together with Europe and much of the rest of the world – in support of Saddam’s Iraq spoke too clearly to the ordinary people in Iran: the world could not accept a revolutionary and independent Iran. A grand geopolitical scheme depicted drug traffickers and their victimised disciples, drug users, as pieces of a global chess game masterminded by the United States and Israel.

The language used in reference to drug offenders (especially narcotraffickers) was eloquent: saudageran-e marg (merchants of death), saudageran-e badbakhti (merchants of misery), gerd-e sheytani (Satanic circle), ashrar (evils).Footnote ³³ These went together with references to the conspiracy that worked against Iran’s anti-narcotic efforts: tout’eh-ye shaytani (diabolic conspiracy) and harbeh-ye este‘mari (colonial weapon).Footnote ³⁴

The lexicon became an enduring feature of anti-narcotic parlance for years to come. There were certainly reasons for blaming international politics for the flow of drugs through Iran. With the Soviet Red Army involved in the Afghan war, the mujahidin took advantage of poppy cultivation as a profitable source of cash and people’s sole means of survival. Afghanistan became the leader in the opium trade, a position it still maintains uncontested. This trade moved through the territory of the Islamic Republic in alarming numbers – between 50 and 90 per cent of all opiates worldwide. In less than a decade, the price of heroin had decreased by five times in the streets of Tehran, establishing itself as a competitive alternative to opium.Footnote ³⁵ Despite reiterated calls for stricter border control, the Iranian authorities were not able to divert their strategic focus eastwards until the end of the war. Geopolitical constraints made the central anti-narcotic strategy – based on supply reduction – in large part futile. Futility, however, did not mean irrelevance. Since the early 1980s, the Islamic Republic came top in opium and heroin seizure globally, an endeavour carried out against the grain of international isolation and lack of regional cooperation with opium producing countries such as Afghanistan and Pakistan.

By 1990, almost three million Afghans lived across Iran, many in Tehran and Baluchistan, both locations key to the drug network.Footnote ³⁶ Of course, the social and ethnic networks connecting Afghan refugees with their social milieu across the border might have helped the smuggling of drugs (as everything else) into Iran. Poverty and lack of economic opportunities had their impact on the reliance of members of these communities on the political economy of the black market. Against this picture, Afghan refugees were object of sporadic episodes of suspicion which depicted them as ‘fifth column’ of international drug mafia aiming at destabilising the Islamic Republic.

The Baluch and the Kurds, both historically involved in the smuggling and illegal economy, including that of drugs, had a similar fate. The drug economy represented a major financial resource of their separatist agendas, which the government regarded with mistrust and open antagonism. For instance, in 1984–5 ‘of the 25,000 kg of drugs confiscated at the national level, 10,000 kg were seized in Sistan and Baluchistan alone’.Footnote ³⁷ The flow of narcotics from the southeast prompted the government to install spatial security barriers between central Iran and regions bordering Afghanistan and Pakistan. The authorities built a security belt in the area of Kerman and across the surrounding desert, with several check points along the highway route. Military and intelligence was deployed to counter the drug flow, with limited success. Aimed at protecting Tehran from the influx of drugs, the barrier had to undercut revenues of those groups that opposed the central government. On the western border, a similar build up took place on the route through the Iranian Kurdistan region leading to Turkey. This spatial intervention localised the burden of the anti-narcotic combat along Iran’s geographical borders, which coincided in part with the ethnical and economic frontiers.Footnote ³⁸

Popular Mobilisation against Illicit Drugs

The experience of the war against Iraq proved instrumental in the fight against narcotics. Revolutionary institutions and parastatal organisations provided a military dimension to the implementation of anti-narcotics operations, which brought in pasdaran (IRGC, aka revolutionary guards), appointees of Revolutionary Courts, basij forces (volunteers), and the many foundations that operated at the ambiguous margins of Iran’s state-led economy. The ‘call on duty’ of this decade also honed in on the narcotics combat. The propaganda machinery, tested with revolution and war, rolled fast on the topic of drugs too. Mosques had a primary role in this scheme. The fulcrum of moralisation programmes in neighbourhoods, they worked in close contact with the local Islamic Committees. In the case of arrests for ‘moral crimes’ (drug use, breach of gender code, gambling), the local committee would bring the offenders to the nearest mosque and, after an impromptu investigation, they could be taken to the Islamic court. State representatives held sermons in mosques, in particular during the officially sanctioned Friday prayers. For instance, in 1988 the national organisation of the Friday Prayers’ Leaders ‘signed a declaration in staunch support of the fight against drugs and the officials involved in the fight’ and called for the involvement of the clergy in the combat.Footnote ³⁹ Pledging allegiance to the war on drugs was as important a duty as the obligation to support the troops on the Iraqi front.

The combat also developed real operational tactics; a number of military plans tackled both drug trafficking and public addiction throughout the national territory. The Revolutionary Guards and the Ministry of Interior conducted operation Val‘adiyat in the region of Hormozgan, which brought to justice ‘more than 2,400 addicts’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Other operations involved naval units in the Strait of Hurmuz or security forces in urban centres, often with large deployments of troops.Footnote ⁴¹ The veneer as well as the structure of these plans bore profound similarities to the simultaneous military operations on the southwest border. Tactically, these operations did not rely exclusively on military personnel and regular forces. Instead, as has been a hallmark of the republican era, a large number of entities connected to parastatal foundations and local committees participated in the operations. The Basij-e Mostaza‘fin Organisation committed 500,000 volunteers to the war on drugs, with representatives being present (but perhaps not particularly active) across most of the urban and rural towns of the country.Footnote ⁴² Even in the urban fringes of the capital, such as the gowd, IRGC Committees had established councils and operational units where ‘the morally deviant elements in the community, e.g. gamblers and drug dealers, were identified and isolated’.Footnote ⁴³

In the framing of the Islamic Republic leadership, the war on drugs was as existential an issue as the war against Iraq. President Ali Khamenei, echoing Khomeini’s slogan, circulated a statement pointing out that ‘the most important question after the war is the question of addiction’; his Prime Minister and later rival Mir Hossein Mousavi also stated, ‘we must give the same importance that we give to the war to the fight against drugs and addiction’.Footnote ⁴⁴ After the resignation of Khalkhali, the anti-narcotics apparatus progressively shifted its focus to intelligence gathering, although this process did not fully materialise before the early 1990s. The Ministry of Information, the equivalent of intelligence and secret services, issued a communiqué to the public requesting full collaboration and information sharing about drug use and drug trafficking. It activated a special telephone number, the 128, and set up local mailboxes so that every citizen could contribute to the fight against narcotics. Newspapers published regular advertisements and distributed leaflets with slogans inviting people to stay alert and cooperate with the police regarding drug consumption.Footnote ⁴⁵ This societal mobilisation produced a level of public engagement in that many families, whether under the influence of fearmongering propaganda or by the experience of ‘addiction’ in the lives of their cohorts, wanted to see the government succeed in the anti-drug campaign. Yet, it also had its counter-effects: collaboration with the authorities meant that discord and infighting could emerge within communities, where local jealousies, deep-seated hatreds or petty skirmishes could justify referral to the authorities with the accusation of drug (ab)use or drug dealing. To settle the score with one’s enemies, the catchall of ‘drugs’ proved instrumental. This also targeted the lower stratum of the drug market, with petty-dealers and ordinary users being identified instead of the bosses and ringleaders.

Mobilisation also meant that the military engaged in armed confrontation with the drug cartels that managed one of the most lucrative and quantitatively significant trades worldwide. Equipped with sophisticated weaponry and organised along ethnic, tribal lines – especially in the Zahedan region, along the border with Pakistan – drug traffickers would often outnumber and outplay the regular army units. When not confronting the army, traffickers would use un-manned camels loaded with drugs to cross the desert and reach a designated area where other human mules would continue the journey towards Tehran and from there to Turkey and Europe. The value of any drug passing an international border would double ipso facto.Footnote ⁴⁶ Once stock reached the western border of Iran, it would be transferred via Iraq or Turkey towards richer European countries, with its value increased by a ratio of a hundred. The lucrative nature of this business made it extremely resilient and highly flexible in the face of any hindrance. Corruption ensued as a logical effect of the trade – as it has been the rule worldwide – and the Islamic Republic was no exception. In several instances, public officials were charged with accusations of drug corruption. The authorities did not take these accusations lightly, the punishment for collaboration with drug cartels being merciless, the death penalty for officials of higher ranking. In 1989, the head of the Anti-Narcotic Section of the Islamic Committee of Zahedan – the capital of opiates trafficking in Iran – was found guilty of ‘taking over 10 million [tuman] bribe from a drug trafficker’;Footnote ⁴⁷ the head of the Drug Control Headquarters (DCHQ) in Mashhad, later in 1995, was judged for his ‘excessive violations in his administration’.Footnote ⁴⁸ The Judiciary applied the maximum sentence. Both officials were hanged.

The Iranian state upheld its moral standing vis à vis these accusations by showcasing the human cost that its war on drugs had had since 1979. The number of soldiers and volunteers who lost their lives in anti-narcotic operations (or while on duty attacked by drug traffickers) increased from 7 in 1979 to more than 155 in 1988 and 264 in 1992. It steadily increased over the years of the Iran–Iraq War, reaching a maximum after the reforms of law enforcement in the early 1990s.

The government bestowed the title of ‘martyrs’, shahid, to all those who lost their lives on anti-narcotic duty (Figure 3.2). The families of the drug war martyrs had all the attached economic and social benefits that the title of martyr carried, approximately equivalent to that of the soldiers who fought and perished on the Iraqi front.Footnote ⁴⁹ They entered the sacred semantic body of the Islamic Republic. While the Sacred Defence ended in 1988, the War on Drugs continued unhampered up to the present day, and with it the drug war martyrs, reaching a peak in the early 1990s, when narcotic combat topped the list of security priorities following the end of the Iran–Iraq War.

Figure 3.2

‘War on Drugs’ Martyrs (per year)

DCHQ, ‘Unpublished data’, undated.

Of the 3,766 security and army members who perished between 1979 and 2015, the greatest share (66 per cent) is represented by the police (NAJA), followed by the IRGC and the Basij (both 11 per cent).Footnote ⁵⁰ The numbers speak, in fact, of the mobilisation character of the ‘War on Drugs’, at least up to the mid 2000s. They also provide raw data on overall levels of drug-related violence in the Iranian context, which confirms that despite the four-decade War on Drugs, Iran has lower levels of violence when compared with other drug-torn contexts, such as 2010s Mexico, 2000s Afghanistan and 1980s Colombia (Figure 3.3).Footnote ⁵¹

Figure 3.3

‘War on Drugs’ Martyrs

DCHQ, ‘Unpublished data’, undated.

Although prevalent, the military/security mobilisation techniques operated alongside a number of more localised, civic and humanitarian initiatives that took place throughout the 1980s and indeed represented a first step towards broader programmes in the following decades. Here too, official and informal institutions worked alongside each other. The Construction Jihad (Jahad-e Sazandegi), for instance, launched autonomous programmes of treatment for female drug (ab)users and their children.Footnote ⁵² Islamic Associations (anjoman-e eslami) built large treatment camps across Tehran and other cities, often overlapping and exchanging patients with state-run centres mentioned above. The Komeyl Hospital was another important example. The hospital actively undertook addiction treatment under the financial support of twelve benefactors from the medical and scientific community. Patients received psychological support during detoxification, at the price of 12,500 rials. Without state support, the organisation relied on the patients’ contribution or the donations of sympathetic supporters.Footnote ⁵³ Once the medical personnel considered the drug user recovered and stable, he (women were not admitted here initially), would be referred to the Construction Effort Organisation in order to find employment. In case of relapse, he would be sent to prison or a labour/treatment camp for imprisonment.Footnote ⁵⁴ A system of treatment/punishment surfaced over the 1980s and connected a network of institutions, organisations, centres and people who belonged and did not belong to the state, allowing limited addiction treatment.

This coexistence of state and non-state support, at the fringes of legality, has an oxymoronic dimension, a feature that would fully develop in the following decades. This experience in the 1980s represented the genealogical ground for the models that materialise in the post-war period, at least in nuce.

After the War (1988–97): Policy Reconstruction and Medicalisation

With the end of the eight-year war against Iraq, the Islamic Republic entered a new phase of its politics, a period labelled ‘Thermidorian’ or ‘Second Republic’.Footnote ⁵⁵ The Islamic Revolution of 1979 intertwined, intrinsically, with the ‘Sacred Defence’, bearing on the evolution of institutions and policies. Questions of political structure and constitutional legitimacy were put on hold for several years during the war, allowing for the adoption of short-term mechanisms of political management. It was not the end of war with Iraq – the war itself having been ‘normalised’ in the lives of Iranians (at least those living away from borders) – but the death of the Supreme Leader that represented the greatest moment of instability for the still-young Islamic Republic. A moment of unprecedented crisis, the political order faced its greatest challenge, for which, however, it had been prepared long before the event. Under the guidance of Khomeini himself, the leading figures of the state had taken a set of institutional measures to manage the post-Khomeini transition.

By the end of the war, the state moved from deploying the politics of religion to being more religiously political. End of the war also prompted the end of popular mobilisation targeted at an external threat (i.e. Iraq), and the need to refocus state formation towards domestic issues, including the rebuilding of infrastructures, of the war economy amidst low oil prices, and the redistribution of resources to those social classes who had selflessly supported the war effort. The coexistence of formal and informal institutions (e.g. the bonyad, the Islamic Committees), which had characterised the war years, needed readjustment for the necessity of post-war recovery.Footnote ⁵⁶ Welfare policies and institutions had to be recalibrated and progressively formalised into readable bureaucratic and administrative machinery.

Institutionalisation and bureaucratisation occurred also in the field of drug policy. The creation of the Drug Control Headquarters (setad-e mobarezeh ba mavadd-e mokhadder) is the most significant development in the country’s drug policy structure, introduced following the approval of the text of the 1988 anti-drug law emanating from the Expediency Council.Footnote ⁵⁷ Public officials’ experiences during the years of the war forged the mentality and practical undertakings of the post-war drug strategy. A distinctive signature of the war, the setad was a venue where officials of different political persuasions, institutional affiliation and expertise would meet and discuss matters of management in politics, security as well as economics, in collective terms. As an executive body, under the command of the president, the drug control setad advised the government and pushed in favour of structural reforms in drugs policy. The setad was also a model of intervention beyond the field of the drug war or, for that matter, the war. The number of governmental and intra-governmental bodies set up under the setad model has been a hallmark of Iranian politics since the 1980s. Among these, the Drug Control Headquarters has been the most powerful and financially significant, but others should not be left aside: the Irregular War setad,Footnote ⁵⁸ the Moral Code setad (‘amr be-ma‘ruf nahi’ bil-monker), the Anti-Smuggling and Counterfeit Goods setad, the National Elections setad.

During the war, the headquarters became the most reliable and fastest way to respond to the urgencies of the front or to domestic problems, such as food shortages and security threats. With the conclusion of the war, however, the government dismantled the war headquarters. The drug war setad, however, had expanded and never ceased to operate since its creation. Its field of intervention spanned from anti-trafficking, intelligence gathering and judicial oversight – in other words, everything related to drug supply reduction – to rehabilitation, treatment (or drug demand reduction), international relations, prevention and research programmes. According to the 1988 law, the DCHQ is the place ‘where all the [drug] related executive and juridical operations shall be centred’ (Figure 3.4).Footnote ⁵⁹

Figure 3.4

DCHQ Membership according to the 1988 Law

Heir to the Office for the Coordination of the Fight against Addiction, headed by Khalkhali in 1980, the DCHQ had the task of coordinating and executing the drug war nationwide. Weighted towards security-oriented programmes, with law enforcement, intelligence and judicial officials being more prominent, the DCHQ adopted a less security-oriented outlook from the 2000s. Its funding has increased constantly since its inception, as have its duties, which cover all the provinces in the country where the Local Coordination Council (shoura-ye hamahangi) of the DHCQ operate.

Its standing, nonetheless, has remained ambiguous. Because its place within the organs of the state is uncertain, the DCHQ is involved in every drug-related matter but does not hold responsibility and its presence at times remains incoherent and ineffective.Footnote ⁶⁰ As a coordination body between different ministries, it rests upon a fragile compromise, which in practice is a coexistence of inconsistencies. The DCHQ works as an oxymoron, a site where otherwise incompatible mechanisms of political intervention find a place to operate (Figure 3.5). By bringing public agents with different approaches on drugs under the same roof, the DCHQ acted as the agency promoting, opposing, criticising and defending all and nothing in national drugs politics. It is both an institutional showcase for Iran’s War on Drugs and the engine of policies that, as I discuss in Part Two, have diverging political objectives.

Figure 3.5

DCHQ Structure in the 2000s

Despite its inconsistencies, the DCHQ had a significant impact on the first half of the 1990s. Under the directorship of Mohammad Fellah, a former intelligence and prison official, two important developments took place.

Deconstruction of scientific and medical expertise characterised the period following the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Instead, the war helped to reintegrate previously undermined professional categories, in particular scientists and doctors, who in the 1990s received renewed state support and encouragement for their activity.Footnote ⁶¹ The medical community gained influence in the making of the post-war approach to illicit drugs and, significantly, drug (ab)use. Mohammad Fellah seconded this trend and pushed tactically towards the medicalisation of ‘addiction’, with the objective of de-emphasising the crime-oriented weight of the drug laws. An outspoken critic of the 1980s policies, he argued for a medical approach and the abandonment of punitive measures. His push eventually succeeded in 1997 when the Expediency Council ruled that addiction was not a crime and could be therefore treated without punishment. Fellah’s other most significant endeavour was more covert. As head of the DCHQ, he facilitated the creation of NGOs in the field of addiction. In line with the mindset of these years, his attempt signalled the need to unburden the social weight of addiction through the inclusion of non-state organisms in tackling drugs. Not coincidently, one of the sub-sections of the DCHQ is specifically dedicated to ‘popular participation’ (mosharekat-e mardomi) in provision of welfare according to the drug laws. The seeds of this strategy, however, would be visible and effective only later in the 2000s.

Conclusions

Revolutions, combats and wars are events that dictate the rhythm of history. Less visible is the way these events impinge upon phenomena such as drugs consumption, drug production and the illegal economy. Drastic political change results in changing worldviews vis-à-vis drugs. This chapter accounted for the epochal transformation that drugs politics underwent from the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty – and its unconventional drug control programmes – to the populist and revolutionary onslaught against narcotics under the newly established Islamic Republic. Drugs acquired the value of political objects, charged with ideological connotation. They were anti-revolutionary first and foremost, only secondarily anti-Islamic. Part of an imperialist plot to divert the youthful strength of the revolution from its global goals, drugs coalesced all that was rotten in the old political order. Victory against illegal drugs was the ultimate revolutionary objective.

From the point of view of political practice, the combat against narcotics borrowed from those same methods used in the crisis management approach of the Iran–Iraq War. Mobilisation of popular forces, creation of multiple headquarters (the setadisation of politics) and the adoption of a language borrowing from the war discourse and its Manichean worldview. As the war ended, drugs politics shifted towards new methods and objectives. The inauguration of the ‘reconstruction era’ under president Ayatollah Hashemi-Rafsanjani (1989–97) meant that economic issues and the concerns of the middle class over security and public space became more central in policymaking. Since multiple competing agencies operated in law enforcement, in 1991 the government approved the merging of the City Police and the Gendarmerie and the Islamic Revolutionary Committees into the NAJA, the Islamic Republic Law Enforcement.Footnote ⁶² The centralisation of law enforcement increased the capacity of the police to control the public space, which resulted in a massive number of arrests, among which those for drug-related offences figured as the absolute highest. Similarly, it led to increasing number of drugs seizures, although this did not have a noticeable effect on drug price. By the late 1990s, drug prices stabilised – even considering Iran’s high inflation – and the public considered drugs as the third social problem after unemployment and high cost of life (Figure 3.6 and Figure 3.7).Footnote ⁶³

Figure 3.6

Drug Prices from 1989 to 2006 (toman/kg)

Figure 3.7

Narcotic Seizure (all type) (1987–2002) (kg)

Data extrapolated from DCHQ quoted in ‘Research Study on Drugs, Crime and Terrorism in the I.R. of Iran’, UNODC (Tehran, January 2006, unpublished report [word file]).

The shift from the external threat (Iraq) to the internal management of (dis)order had its direct effects on drug policy. With a government that pursued a smaller role for itself in the public life of Iranians and which sought the privatisation of some sectors of the economy, the management of the drug problem also faced transformation. The state-run treatment camps, amid the criticism of violence, abuse and mismanagement, were progressively closed, including that of Shurabad. There was an attempt to shift the provision of services for drug (ab)users to their families or, for that matter, to the private sector. In this, the reintegration of the medical professions was timely and instrumental.

By the end of the 1990s, there was a boom in private practice of treatment for middle-class drug (ab)users; their practice was not concealed from the public gaze and actually took place through advertisements in newspapers and on the radio, as well as posters on walls and in shopping malls. Although the government intervened to restrain the illegal market of treatment, private practices of cure and pseudo-treatment remained a vibrant sector of Iran’s addiction para-medicine. It was part and parcel of the socialisation of drug ‘addiction’ and the shift towards the privatisation of treatment that ensued in the later decades. Demobilisation, a key aspect of Rafsanjani’s politics, worked equally in the field of drugs politics. A new technocratic class gained legitimacy and asserted the right to manage the challenging environment of post-war Iran. It also promised to make this environment stable, prosperous and profitable for those operating in the private sector. These elements distinguished the basis for a new pragmatic approach to government, which set the stage for the emergence of reformism and post-reformism.

Introduction

Just below the surface of post-war president Hashemi Rafsanjani’s demobilisation process (1989–97), new political and social groups had made an appearance in Iranian society, bringing forth new interpretations about religion and politics, as well as up-to-date ideas about social and political reforms. They contested, constructively, the relationship between religion and state, asking for increasing political participation in the country’s domestic affairs. In other words, they demanded more representation in the institutions and the acknowledgment by the political order (nezam) of the changing nature of Iranian society. Securing the support of these new constituencies, Mohammad Khatami, the soft-spoken and intellectually sophisticated cleric, received plebiscitary support in the presidential elections of 1997, sanctioning the birth of a pluralistic and civil society-oriented political agent, the second Khordad movement (jonbesh-e dovvom-e Khordad). The birth of the reform movement left a lasting signature on the public politics of the Islamic Republic, despite its demise and cornering, up until today.

The movement, which takes its name from the victory date of Khatami’s first election, aimed to ‘normalise’ state–society relations; in the words of Ehteshami, ‘to overhaul the Islamic Republic; modernize its structures; rationalize its bureaucracy; and put in place a more accountable and responsive system of government’.Footnote ² Normalisation, in other words, meant downplaying the revolutionary rhetoric and opening new space for the categories side-lined since the early 1980s. Making tactical use of media, in particular newspapers, the reform movement opened up new spaces of confrontation and debate, and called for wide-scale updating at a level of policy and polity. It did so not without serious backlash.Footnote ³

Younger generations constituted the backbone of the eslahat (reforms). Composed largely of the urban, educated, young spectrum of people, among whom women played an active and influential role, they called for a rejuvenation of revolutionary politics. Support came also from a multifaceted, if not very theoretical, group of post-Islamist intelligentsia, disillusioned with the static orthodoxy of state ideology and keen to foster an understanding of religion and politics which was dynamic, attuned with the post-Cold War context, ready to settle with liberal and neoliberal compromises. While intellectual circles – known as ‘new religious intellectuals’ (roshan-fekran-e dini) – espoused a theoretical, elitist and rather esoteric strategy to redesign and reform the Islamic Republic, often by appealing to the cultural and philosophical antecedents of Iran’s history, women and social activists attempted to introduce change by practice.Footnote ⁴ Thus occurred the curious and quantitatively important expansion of Iranian civil society, which fomented the success of, and was later fomented by, the reformist president Khatami. To use the words of political scientist Ghoncheh Tazmini, civil society needed ‘to bridge the conceptual gap that existed between society and the state – a state increasingly lacking in civic input’.Footnote ⁵ Hence, civil society became also a governmental instrument to circumnavigate the many hazards along the path of societal reforms. As a member of the Majles said by the end of the Khatami mandate, ‘If you interpret reform as a movement within the government, I think yes, this is the end. But if you regard it as a social phenomenon, then it is still very much alive’.Footnote ⁶

The change in Iran’s political atmosphere brought about by Mohammad Khatami’s election, combined with the influence of experts’ knowledge, opened up an unprecedented, and rather unrestrained, debate about how to deal with social dilemmas and, especially, with the problem of drug (ab)use. This chapter intends to discuss the changes preceding Iran’s harm reduction reform – the set of policies that enable welfare and public health interventions for drug (ab)users – through an analysis of the social and political agents that contributed to its integration in the national legislation. The period taken into consideration coincides with that of the two-term presidency of Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005), but with some flexibility. After all, the timeframe is intended to give a conceptual system in which reformism à la iranienne overlaps with a broader movement in support of harm reduction. As such, the two phenomena never coincided, but they interacted extensively.

Without dwelling on the actual narratives of the reform movement, which have been thoroughly studied elsewhere, one can infer that with the onset of the reformist era, the field of drug policy entered concomitantly with higher polity into the playground of revision and reassessment. Most of the reforms promoted by the presidency had ended in resounding failure, the most evident case being Khatami’s debacle of the ‘twin bills’ in 2003 and the limitations on freedom of expression that were powerfully in place at the end of his presidency. The first one refers to two governmental proposals that would have bolstered the executive power of the president and curbed the supervising powers of veto of the Guardian Council. The latter institution oversees eligibility criteria for the country’s elections and it has repeatedly been a cumbersome obstacle to reforms. Targeted by the judiciary throughout the early 2000s, the reformist camp had been cajoled into helplessness and disillusionment towards the perspective of institutional reforms and change within the higher echelons of the Islamic Republic.

After introducing reformism and the contextual changes taking place over this period, the chapter sheds light on the changing phenomenon of drug (ab)use and how it engendered a situation of multiple crises. It analyses the process by which the Iranian state introduced reforms within the legislation. These changes were not the result of instantaneous and abrupt political events, rather they followed a fast-paced, directional shift in attitude among expert knowledge, the policymaking community and the political leadership. Although the Chapter travels through the historical events of the reformist government, it does so only with the aim of casting analytical light on the how harm reduction became a legitimate public policy. Thus, it scrutinises the interaction between public institutions, grassroots organisations and the international community in their bid to introduce a new policy about illicit drugs. Key to the proceeding of this chapter is the conceptualisation of ‘policy’. As discussed in Chapter 1, policy identifies a set of events, in the guise of processes, relations, interventions, measures, explicit and hidden actions, declarations, discourses, laws and reforms enacted by the state, its subsidiaries or those agents acting in its stead. It also includes medical statements, webs of meaning, semantic spaces with a complex ‘social life’, agency and unclear boundaries. This holistic understanding of policy fits the definition of ‘apparatus’, a device that coalesces during times of crises and which is composed of ‘resolutely heterogeneous’ categories, as in the case of Iranian reformism.Footnote ⁷

Crisis as an Idiom for Reforms

Since the successful eradication of poppy cultivation during the 1980s, most of the opiates entering into Iran originated in Afghanistan. Between 1970 and 1999, Afghan opium production increased from 130 tons to 4600 tons annually. This stellar increase is justified as a counter-effect of the ban in Iran and Turkey and the spike in demand for opiates, especially heroin, in Europe and North America.Footnote ⁸ Opium flow had been steady over the course of the 1980s and the 1990s, but the advance of the Taliban since 1996 and the capture of Kabul by their forces in September of that same year, signalled important changes for Iran’s drug situation. In control of almost the entire opium production in Afghanistan, the regime in Kabul negotiated with the international community – in particular the antecedent to the UNODC, the UNDCP, a ban on the cultivation of poppies in all the territories it controlled – in exchange of international development aid. Scepticism being the rule vis à vis the Taliban among international donors, most of the funds for alternative farming were held back and Afghanistan produced a record of 4,600 tons in 1999.Footnote ⁹ Funded by Saudi and Sunni radical money, the Taliban forces put up strong anti-Iranian opposition. The drug flow meant Iranian authorities’ strategy on illicit drugs bore little results. Iran’s long-term ally in Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance, had previously agreed to a ban of the poppy in June 1999, but with no effect on the actual opium output because most flowers grew in Taliban-controlled lands. The following year, though, an order of the Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s political leader, abruptly banned poppy cultivation and 99 per cent of opium production stopped, with only 35 tons being produced.Footnote ¹⁰ The effects of this were immediate on the Iranian side: an upward spiral in the price of opium (more than 400 per cent rise)Footnote ¹¹; and a lack of supply to Iran’s multitudinous opium users signified a shock in the drug market (Figure 4.1, Figure 4.2).

Figure 4.1

Share of Narcotics as Global Seizures (1990–2001)

Figure 4.2

Morphine and Heroin Seizure (kg)

Many older drug users recall the effect of the Taliban opium ban with tragic remembrance. Many had seen their friends falling sick, or worse, dying.Footnote ¹² With opium out of the market and heroin both impure and exorbitantly costly, people who had previously smoked, sniffed or eaten opium, shifted first to smoking heroin (as this had been the most common form of use in Iran, because of the high purity) and then to injecting it.Footnote ¹³ The death toll due to drug (ab)use reached record levels and confirmed the risk of a massive shift among drug users to heroin (Figure 4.3). It was the production of another crisis within the discursive crisis of drug phenomena (Table 4.1).

Figure 4.3

Prices of Illicit Drugs (tuman per kg)

DCHQ, ‘Statistics’ (UNODC, unpublished, undated, [Excel File]).

DCHQ Officials had previously tried to compel the Taliban government to reduce opium production, but they had not envisioned the crisis that a sudden fall in opium supply could cause among Iranian drug (ab)users. With skyrocketing prices and increasing adulteration of the drug, many opium users opted to shift to heroin, which was more available and, comparatively, cheaper. Heroin, because of its smaller size and its higher potency, had been easier to smuggle in, despite the harsher penalties that this faced. Small quantities of the drug produced more potent effects on the body, reducing withdrawal symptoms (Figure 4.4).

Figure 4.4

Number of Drug-Related Deaths (1998–2006)

It is unclear whether the increase is related to the increase in the numbers of drug users. It may indicate the higher impurity of opiates or a general shift towards injecting opiates which trigger a higher risk of overdose.

DCHQ, ‘Statistics’ (UNODC, unpublished, undated [Excel File]).

Heroin posed a greater threat than opium; the latter had maintained its status as a traditional substance and had further regained authority – as a miraculous painkiller – among many war veterans who suffered from chronic pain and post-traumatic effects and ‘mental distress’.Footnote ¹⁴ Heroin use among larger sections of the population signalled the shift towards more modern consumption habits, with many complexities and challenges such as the risk of HIV-AIDS, hepatitis and other infectious diseases. Injecting, hence, bears twice the negative mark of drug use. It is culturally seen as exogenous and estranged from the traditional style of use (e.g. eating, smoking), which incorporates sharing as an essential part of the drug-use culture, and can therefore be interpreted as Westernised, if not Westoxified.Footnote ¹⁵ Although within injecting-drug-user communities sharing also signifies commonality and mutuality, it is cast as dangerous and socially harmful in mainstream society, as it symbolises both destitution and HIV risks. In Iran, the stigma on injection embodied the bottom-line of drug use, the tah-e khatt (endline).

The increase in heroin use engendered a situation of perceived crisis throughout Iran’s policymaking community. State officials discussed the need to manage the Afghan opium market and to intervene directly in Afghanistan to secure the supply of opium, preventing drug users from shifting to substances that were more dangerous. Iran entered in negotiations with international partners concerning possible Iranian involvement in Afghanistan at the end of 2000, aimed at purchasing the entire Afghan opium harvest and transforming it into pharmaceutical morphine. This proposal was turned down due to international opposition, allegedly by the United States.Footnote ¹⁶ At that point, Seyyed Alizadeh Tabatabai, who acted as advisor to Khatami in the DCHQ and was a member of the Tehran City Council, put forward the bold proposal of trading Iranian wheat for Afghan opium.Footnote ¹⁷ He also suggested that for those addicts who could not be treated, the government should provide state-sponsored opium in order to ‘reduce harm’ for society, while also exporting the excess quantities in the form of morphine.Footnote ¹⁸ Despite the failures of these initiatives, the change in attitude indicated a new pragmatism towards the drug problem, one which did not concentrate exclusively on drugs per se, but attempted to read them within the broader social, political and economic context of late 1990s. The discursive shift was also a symptom of the reformist officials’ unease with the country’s stifled and uncompromising ‘War on Drugs’. The remarks of public officials implied a ‘harm reduction’ mentality broader than the field of drugs policy, permeating a new vision (and ideology) of state–society relations. It was also the litmus test about Iran’s willingness to introduce reforms in the field of drugs, as a matter of urgency. At the heart of the reformist camp infatuation with a new approach to drugs and addiction was a quest for reforming society at large; not simply agreeing to change a technical mechanism within the drug policy machinery.

There were discussions in the medical community about the immediate necessity of a substitute for opium, which was becoming costly and hardly available. Meetings took place in different settings – within the DCHQ, the Ministry of Health and in workshops organised by the UNODC.Footnote ¹⁹ Discussions started about introducing methadone into the Iranian pharmacopeia to offer it to all opium users as a legal substitute.Footnote ²⁰ The medical community urged the government to act rapidly to prevent a massive shift towards heroin use, an event which could have had lasting consequences for the country’s health and social outlook. There were strong disagreements about the introduction of methadone,Footnote ²¹ but methadone was recognised as a substance embodying useful features in the management of the opiate crisis. Its pharmacological effects had the potency to perform as a synthetic substitute to opium and heroin, without compelling the government to reintroduce the cultivation of poppies (which was deemed morally problematic after the prohibition campaigns of the 1980s). Methadone created a strong dependence in the patient under treatment, at times stronger than heroin’s, but without its enduring rush of pleasure and ecstasy, which was seen as one of the deviant aspects of heroin use by the authorities. Moreover, it was relatively cheap to produce since Iran had already developed its pharmaceutical industry in this sector.

By the time the authorities discussed the introduction of methadone, in the early 2000s, there were reports about a new drug, kerak.Footnote ²² Not to be confused with the North American crack, the Iranian kerak (aka kerack) is a form of compressed heroin, with a higher potency. Kerak was cheaper, stronger and newer, appealing also to those who wanted to differentiate themselves from old-fashioned opium users and the stigmatised heroin injectors.Footnote ²³ Its name reprised the North American drug scene of the late 1980s and the ‘crack epidemic’, but it had no chemical resemblance to it. Iran’s kerak had a higher purity than street heroin and was dark in colour, while US crack was cocaine-based and white. The name, in this case, operated as a fashion brand among users who regarded kerak as a more sophisticated substance, which, despite its chemical differences, connected them to American users and global consumption trends. It soon became evident that kerak consumption had similar effects to that of heroin, despite it being less adulterated during the early 2000s.Footnote ²⁴

Meanwhile, public officials hinted at the average age of drug (ab)use falling. In a country where three quarters of the population were under thirty, it did not take long before the public – and the state – regarded the kerak surge as a crisis within the crisis, a breeding ground for a future generation of addicts. By 2005, kerak was already the new scare drug. With the rise in drug injecting and an ever-rising prison population, Iran was going downhill towards a severe HIV epidemic. In discourse, doctors, experts, and political authorities were contributing to a new framing of the crisis.Footnote ²⁵ The medical community had tried to sensitise the government about the dangerous health consequences of injecting drug habits in prison, but prior to the reformist government, the normative reaction among decision-makers was denial. Mohammad Fellah, former head of the Prison Organisation (Sazman-e Zendan-ha-ye Keshvar) and knowledgeable about the challenge represented by incarcerating drug (ab)users, on several occasions demonstrated his opposition to the anti-narcotic model adopted over those years. Overtly, he maintained that prison for drug crimes is ineffective.

Iran’s prison population had increased consistently since the end of the war, with the number of drug offenders tripling between 1989 and 1998 (Figure 4.5). In 1998, drug-related prisoners numbered around more than 170,000. The situation became so alarming that the head of the Prison Organisation publicly asked the NAJA ‘not to refer the arrested addicts to the prisons’.Footnote ²⁶ For a country that had declared an all-out war on narcotic drugs since 1979, and paid a heavy price in human and financial terms to stop the flow of drugs, availability of drugs in prisons – a presumably highly secure institution – meant that the securitisation approach against drugs had failed. If denial had been the usual reaction of the authorities in the 1980s and early 1990s, the HIV and hepatitis crises of late 1990s had prevented any further camouflage.

Figure 4.5

Drug-Related Crimes (1989–2005)

DCHQ, ‘Statistics’.

As Behrouzan holds, ‘understanding the role of prisons in the spread of HIV and AIDS was critical to the policy paradigm shift that occurred in the 1990s’.Footnote ²⁷ Although there had been some attention to the issue of HIV in the early 1990s, this had never turned into an explicit and comprehensive policy with regard to HIV prevention. It was only in 1997, that the government commissioned, under pressure from the National Committee to Combat AIDS (set up in 1987), the first study of HIV prevalence in three provincial prisons: the Ab-e Hayat prison in Kerman province, the Abelabad prison in Shiraz and the Dizelabad prison in Kermanshah. The results were disturbing. Almost 100 per cent of drug-injecting prisoners were HIV-positive, many of them married.Footnote ²⁸ Kermanshah had seen the number of HIV infected people going up from 58 cases in 1996, to 407 cases in 1997 and 1,228 cases in 2001.Footnote ²⁹ Crisis took the form of an epidemic semantically and ideologically associated with so-called Westoxified behaviours (sexual promiscuity, homosexuality, injecting drugs). For a state governed under imperatives of ethical righteousness, moral orthodoxy and political straightness, the HIV epidemic bypassed the frontiers of public health and touched those of public ethics and politics. The reactions oscillated between silent denial among some and hectic alarmism among others. The governmental team of the reformist president tipped the balance in favour of forward-looking approaches to the HIV epidemic and allowed civil society organisations to intervene in this field. Failure meant necessity for reforms. Crisis in the moral coding of the Islamic Republic confirmed the need to update, to reform the political order in line with new challenges.

During the Twenty-sixth Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly on HIV/AIDS in 2001, the deputy Minister of Health declared to the international community,

Iran’s HIV epidemic, generally caused by shared needles, spread rapidly in the country’s western provinces that had suffered the effects of the eight-year war with Iraq. There, the psychological and physiological traces of the war materialised in the form of massive drug (ab)use. HIV prevalence was highest (more than 5 per cent) among prisoners in Khuzestan, Hormozgan, Kermanshah and Ilam.Footnote ³¹

In south-western cities, large-scale displacement, destruction of dwellings and infrastructures and psychological unsettledness during the 1980s was followed by paucity of employment opportunities and lack of adequate life conditions (lack of infrastructure, air pollution) from the 1990s onwards.

The ground for reforms developed through local experimentation. Policymakers implemented these experimentations in policy on the social and spatial margins. These margins were both geographical and ethical, overlapping with the most unstable disorderly categories among Iran’s millions-strong drug-using population. The first group of people was that of the homeless, vagrant heroin and kerak users on the outskirt of the cities and in the once-known gowd of Southern Tehran.Footnote ³² Other categories included rural men who had moved into the urban centres, mostly Tehran’s peripheries, in search of occupation, which often resulted in desultory jobs, further marginalisation and the adoption of more sophisticated style of drug use (heroin, kerak use versus traditional opium smoking). The second category was that of the prisoners. The two categories had mostly overlapped in the country’s modern history, where the main target of systematic police repression has been the street drug (ab)users.

In particular, the epidemiology of HIV transmission among drug-consuming prisoners had a far-reaching influence on the policy outcomes. The journey of the virus from inside to outside the prison describes the genealogical trajectory of Iran’s harm reduction. As the crisis originated inside prisons, the policy had to be subject to experiment first in the prison context, evaluated and then propagated outside (Figure 4.6).

Figure 4.6

Methadone Clinics in Prisons

The year 1381 corresponds to 2002–3 in the Gregorian calendar.

DCHQ, Annual Report 2009 (Tehran, 2010)

The introduction of harm reduction programmes in prisons followed a broader reform project within the Prison Organisation. In 2001, the head of the Prison Organisation submitted a letter to the Head of the Judiciary to request his opinion and support for the prison reform. This included the abolition of prison uniform which ‘humiliates the criminals, [and it] is contrary to the correctional purposes of prisons’,Footnote ³³ increased training and free time for prisoners, and providing alternatives to incarceration.Footnote ³⁴ The latter was the object of complex debate within the institutions. Although the topic did not exclusively relate to drug offenders, the issue of drug policy reform was the panacea for the prison system. In 2005, a group of seventeen MPs requested abrogation of the 1980 ‘Law for strengthening sanctions for drug crimes’ – the major pillar of post-revolutionary policy about drugs – to enable the judge to take into consideration elements such as age, gender, social and family condition, to avoid harsher sanctions and, tactically, the overcrowding of prisons. By 2005, drug offenders made up about 60 per cent of the prison population, the great majority men (90 per cent).Footnote ³⁵ Drug users represented 50–60 per cent of prisoners, many of whom had started injecting in prison, usually with shared needles. The push towards a reform of the criminal law, with reference to alternatives to incarceration, was envisioned within the idea of state–society reforms promoted during Khatami’s presidency as much as in response to a critical stage in prison management.

A reality of crisis, both symbolic (ethical legitimacy of the Iranian state) and material (the epidemics of HIV, prison plus injecting drug use) triggered policy change and political reforming. It was the manifestation of a politics of crisis rooted in the post-revolutionary, post-war ideology of government, and governmentality. In the years after the war, social categories such as war veterans, women and young people were increasingly using drugs, with the signs of this phenomenon being more evident in public by the day. Comparisons with the pre-revolutionary period revealed a worsening of the drug phenomenon, despite the material and rhetorical efforts of the political leadership. Those who had lived during the Pahlavi regime’s years, recalled the issue of drugs as mostly a weekend vice among elderly people, while a glance at the 2000s situation showed every social strata, and all generations, affected by illicit drugs. A legitimacy crisis for the Islamic Republic was on the way, through the historicisation of political/social phenomena, by which people and politics interpreted the crisis. With two decades having passed since the Islamic Revolution, policies were being disposed within a frame that contemplated a historical chronology. The adoption of crisis as an idiom of reform became part of this historisation process.

To respond to the failures of the present, public agents from different official and civic venues initiated a reformist bid in the field of drugs policy. Their concerted tactics resulted in Iran’s harm reduction strategy.

Harm Reduction: Underground, Bottom-Up and ‘Lights Off’

Towards the end of the 1990s, public discourse hinted at the failure of Iran’s two-decade war on drugs, but statements by officials were only moderately critical, with a few exceptions.Footnote ³⁶ The state sought the way out of the impasse through collaboration with non-state organisations, in order to intervene without directly being involved in the thorny question. Evidently, drugs and HIV had political underpinnings that could mire the reformist government. Public officials promoting reformist methods on drug (ab)use and the HIV epidemic adopted medical, pathological frames. Rooted in the way social sciences and scientists in general discuss societal and sociological matters, the social pathology inclination is deep-rooted in Iranian politics. Through this lens, unorthodox behaviour, anger, crime and other ‘deviant realities’ are read as pathologies of society, of modernity, of the city, of globalisation and so on. This historical inclination overlapped with the reintegration of the medical community in the post-war period resulting in a new place for medicine – and, hence, pathological frames – in politics.

Medicine and pathological frames had a productive effect too. Legitimated by their ‘scientific’ discourse, doctors had more leeway to intervene in the public debate. Their arguments resonated positively also with Islamic law, where the priority of individual and public health justify unorthodox interpretation of the law – and of government. Their criticisms remained within the realm of public policy, of mechanism, of management and of community welfare. It did not discuss changes in the political order, in politics at a higher level. Medicine became a malleable tool for supporters and antagonists of reforms, a venue to express resentment and critical thoughts regarding contemporary Iran, its social and political failures, without endangering the political order and its ethical primacy.

In this socio-political ecosystem, the synergies between public officials, medical professionals, civil society groups and international drug experts coalesced around the need to reform Iran’s drugs policy. Individuals in the anti-drug administration made good use of their clout ‘from below’ in the law-making machinery of the state; civil society groups intensified their grassroots operations, helped by financing and knowledge provision of international organisations inside Iran. This assemblage of forces gave birth, rather rapidly – in about four or five years – to a structured and multi-sectorial harm reduction system operating countrywide. These practical steps in the making of a legalised harm reduction field preceded the Head of the Judiciary Ayatollah Mahmud Hashemi-Shahrudi’s approval of ‘harm reduction’. In January 2005, the judicial branch issued a decree supporting needle exchange programmes and warning against interference by state organisations (e.g. police and judiciary) with these ‘needed and fruitful public health interventions’.Footnote ³⁷ On June 8, 2005, after a process of several years, President Mohammad Khatami’s ministerial cabinet, at the suggestion of the Head of the Judiciary, approved the bill of ‘Decriminalisation of treatment of those suffering from narcotic drug abuse’. The law entrusted ‘the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Social Security with all the duties and responsibilities of prevention, treatment and harm reduction of narcotic and psychoactive drug use’.Footnote ³⁸ Those operating in drug policy regarded the move as an effective decriminalisation of addiction’ and an Islamic juridical backing of substitution and maintenance treatment, exemplified by methadone treatment and needle exchange programmes.

For the first time, the notion of harm reduction was included in the national legislation of the Islamic Republic of Iran.Footnote ³⁹ By providing drug (ab)users with clean and sanitised paraphernalia (needles, condoms, etc.), harm reduction support centres do not require drug users to give up drug use. From an ethical standpoint, the approval of harm reduction signified the acceptance that drug consumption is an inescapable aspect of human life, to which governments need to respond by reducing harms and not by ideological opposition. Harm reduction was a realistic response, with pragmatic underpinning. How did a conservative juridical branch turn in favour of contentious practices of needle exchange programmes and methadone substitution inside and outside prisons, when it had previously taken up a total ideological combat against drug consumers?

The State – Driving with the Lights Off

One should not overestimate the capacity to produce change in the highly resilient environment of Iranian public policy. Opposition to policy reform remained staunch despite the sense of emergency and crisis propelled by the HIV epidemic.

Informal, semi-legal practices of harm reduction coexisted, for the initial years, with a set of regulations that, de jure¸ outlawed them. Criminalisation of drug (ab)users, particularly those visible in the public eye (e.g. homeless and poorer drug consumers), remained steadfast. Policing loomed large over the heads of social workers, outreach personnel and drug consumers seeking harm reduction services. Started in very marginal zones of the urban landscapes of Iran’s growing cities, harm reduction kept working with hidden (to the security state’s eye) and underground programmes. Hooman Narenjiha, former director for prevention and advisor in addiction treatment to the Drug Control Headquarters (DCHQ), claims that ‘in order to approve harm reduction and institutionalise this new approach, harm reduction programmes had to be initiated cheragh khamush, [lights off]’.Footnote ⁵⁶

Lights off required direction from those in the administration of drugs politics. High and mid-ranking officials in the Ministry of Health, Welfare Organisation, and the DCHQ laid the groundwork for the harm reductionists. From behind the scenes, public officials backed the work of civil society groups, opening a sympathetic space within their own institutions vis-à-vis harm reduction, before harm reduction’s approval in the national legislation. A group of people within the public institutions lobbied in favour of legal reforms in drug policy, while civil society groups pushed the boundaries in practice. Among them, Said Sefatian, former head of drug demand reduction in the DCHQ, played a fundamental role. Over the more than eight years of his mandate at the DCHQ, Sefatian witnessed the country’s rapid shift in favour of harm reduction.Footnote ⁵⁷ Speaking about the outset of harm reduction during an interview, he said,

This account points to the persistent criminalisation coexisting with the introduction of harm reduction practices. The endurance of security-oriented approaches epitomises deep-rooted elements within state power. Driving with the lights off was the methodology of action in order to escape institutional, ideological obstacles. It was based on the synergy between public officials who supported the promotion of harm reduction and civil society groups operating on the ground. For instance, Bahram Yeganeh, who acted as the director of Iran’s AIDS committee during the reformist period, explains that when there were talks about needle exchange programmes within prisons, the top authorities of the Prison Organisation declared their opposition, but with ‘the collaboration of mid-ranking officials [modiran-e miyaneh] we carried it out, while the upper level was against it’.Footnote ⁵⁹ The mesostrata of the state acted as a practical ground between civil society and the state, somehow bypassing the formal hierarchy existent in ordinary situations.

Sefatian refers to the actual group of people, within and without the state, whose synergies worked in favour of harm reduction. He refers to this group as an alliance of people who had similar concerns about addiction and shared values in how to respond to the crisis.

This group of people, who belonged to different institutions often in competition with each other, was key in connecting the practices of non-governmental organisations with the judiciary, the policy community in the Majles and the negotiating body with regard to drugs policy, the Expediency Council.Footnote ⁶¹ Because the police intervened in many cases to stop the activities of the DICs, Sefatian thought of an expedient, a way to turn this repression into a positive force.Footnote ⁶² He opted to go public:

Through the media, the harm reductionists brought the contention to the public sphere and to the attention of the judiciary and the government. The ‘proximity’ with the often security-oriented judicial authority, in particular, represented another opportunity to introduce the advantages (and values) of harm reduction within the order of state law-making. As Sefatian recounts, once called in front of the Attorney General to explain his remarks about the worsening condition of ‘addiction’, he took advantage of the circumstances to speak about the benefits that Iran could obtain from going all the way forward in implementing harm reduction. His argument was similar to those that the Alaei brothers and Bijan Nasirimanesh used with clerics and ordinary citizens in order to break the taboo of providing clean needles to drug users and prisoners. Although Sefatian did not coordinate his actions and statements with civic groups, and vice versa, the dialogue and exchange of ideas informed their engagement with the higher layers of drugs politics.

This situation generated, ipso facto, a common idiom of ‘crisis’ and a common set of argumentation around it to adopt when discussing reforms and harm reduction with those opposing them, first and foremost with the state. Sefatian’s role and his connections with on-the-ground groups is revealing of the scope of ‘politics from below’ within Iranian public policy. Elements within the governmental machinery operated, persuasively and materially, in order to produce, firstly, practical change in the field of drug policy and, eventually, formal recognition of this change in the laws. Politics from below played along with the HIV epidemics and the shifts towards more dangerous drug consumption patterns in the early 2000s. The harm reduction assemblage made of public officials, informal networks and civic groups built up its own apparatuses of crisis management.

The judicial authority and the clergy as a whole needed to clarify their official stance, and to confront those critics who blamed them for being unresponsive on this issue. To find an acceptable and pragmatic solution, language had to hint at simple wisdom, with a loose Koranic justification: between bad and worse, one is required to opt for bad.Footnote ⁶⁴ According to the mainstream interpretation of the Koran, if a Muslim’s life is in in danger of death, he or she is required to survive even when survival is dependent on committing sinful acts (haram), such as drinking alcohol if alcohol is the only available beverage in the desert, eating dead bodies if that is the only available food, or providing clean needles to pathological drug users, if that is the only way one can prevent deadly HIV infections for them and their families. Connected to the notion of zarurat (necessity/emergency), which I shall discuss in the next Chapter, this hermeneutical vision allowed the clergy to adopt a flexible position vis-à-vis matters of governance. This further justified reform-oriented approaches to drug laws, for the Expediency Council had already prefigured drug phenomena as part of the state maslahat (interest) and a primary field of management of crisis.

As for the media, the coverage of controversial programmes for addiction had no immediate favourable return for the harm reduction movement. Most of the reportage was negative and critical; public opinion maintained its traditional dislike for drug (ab)users, addicts, as dangerous subjects, associating them with criminal behaviour and moral deviancy. The role of the media, nonetheless, was not aimed at changing, in the first place, public opinion, but at creating a public debate about illicit drug and public health. As revealed by Sefatian himself:

For the harm reductionists, it was crucial to introduce their arguments into the public debate. A famous aphorism comes to mind: ‘the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about’.

Can this be regarded as a distinguishing method of action in a political environment resistant to change, such as that of Iran? By counterbalancing the soft means of the press and the defiant practices of NGOs, to the coercion of the police and the law, public officials supporting harm reduction opened up a political space for discussion and change. The case in question also defines an established tactic among policy reformers, which has had its precedents in recent history. In 1998, then-director of the DCHQ, Mohammad Fellah, had attempted shifting the way people discussed and thought of addiction. In an interview, he revealed:

Considering that at the time of this interview, addiction was a crime, Fellah’s expedient is paradigmatic of repertoires entrenched in the mechanism of power and reform. Indeed, it might well be that it was the legacy of Mohammad Fellah in the DCHQ that provided the tools and tactics of action among the harm reductionists, as in the case of Sefatian. Fellah and Sefatian’s tactics exemplify similar acts of politics from below within the policymaking community.

Strategic resistance met opposition to harm reduction; public debates, clandestine connections, semi-formal networks worked in favour of reforms. The use of the media in the policy ‘game’ is a bearer of great significance when contextualised in the mechanisms of power during the reformist governments. It is, in the words of Gholam Khiyabani, the press which carries the burden and acts as ‘a surrogate party’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Newspapers and journals become the arena for new proposals indirectly (or explicitly) related to a particular political group or faction. It is no coincidence that both NGOs and press publications incremented their output and coverage from Khatami’s election in 1997 onwards. In this regard, one could argue that civil society, too, had become a ‘surrogate party’, an indirect government for the reformist, or to put it more crudely, civil society performed as the government in practice. Support for groups outside government, such as the NGOs, was instrumental to the government itself, for it had the objective to push for reforms otherwise unspeakable by the government itself.

Contextually to the rise of the harm reduction, rogue (more or less) members loosely associated with the anti-reformist camp discredited, accused or, worse, physically harmed several high-profile ministers and officials.Footnote ⁷⁰ These individuals paid the price for demanding more daring reforms in the political order. Reformism meant that the ‘red lines’ of politics blurred, with the risks and stakes higher than ever. Harm reductionists too faced challenges from those who deemed their push for reforms as incompatible and threatening the Islamic order or the security of the state. On several occasions, the authorities seemed on the verge of turning back and stopping all harm reduction programmes. Gelareh Mostashari, senior expert in drug demand reduction at the UNODC office in Tehran, speaks about it in these terms:

The diatribe referred to immediately went public in the Tehran-based newspaper Hamshahri on October 22, 2003, with the title ‘Favourable and Contrary Reactions to the Maintenance of High-risk Drug Addicts in Jazireh’, where several members of the DCHQ argued in favour of harm reduction, criticising those who wanted to look backward, implicating Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, then Head of the Police.Footnote ⁷³ Qalibaf had been putting more than a spanner in the NGOs’ works. He repeatedly targeted Persepolis outreach programmes in Darvazeh Ghar, attacked the DIC of another NGO in Khak-e Sefid (an infamous gangster nest in Eastern Tehran) and continued generally to stand against the medicalisation of drug (ab)use.Footnote ⁷⁴

Harm reduction found itself stranded between health and welfare on the one hand, and law and order on the other. Lack of cooperation between different branches of the state exacerbated the idiosyncrasy of reformism, caught between government and the securitising state. Crisis helped getting out of the impasse, with civil society groups turning to the device of crisis management and its technology of intervention amidst the impossibility of action. This process involved pressures, resistance to diktats, promotion of sympathetic projects and informal connections, including with international organisations, in primis the UNODC.

Conclusions

As the reformist government initiated a reflexive moment with regard to the role, reach and regulations of the state, it also acknowledged the limitations proper to the agency of its government, which were also due to the conflictual nature of inter-institutional dynamics during the period 1997–2005. The lost hegemony of state apparatuses, on the one hand, brokered an opportunity for ‘co-regulation’ and pilotage in tandem with civil society organisations.Footnote ⁹⁴ The flow of opium, first, then its sudden drop, coalesced with the increase of injecting as a mode of consumption, which in turn contributed to the spread of the virus HIV. The drug assemblage constituted by the multiple crises around illicit drugs – health, ethical, social and political – opened up opportunities for co-working between competing apparatuses. Informal civic workers, medical professionals, prison officials, international donors, bureaucrats and politicians were all part in the great game of drugs politics. Their inroads, often informal if not illegal, enabled change by practice and, finally, recognition of reforms. The developments of the reformist period, in fact, did not result from the enunciation of governmental policies ‘from above’. The government never took the lead in changing the content of drug control programmes. Instead, a pluralistic alliance of diverse groups, which acted not always in coordination with each other and rarely in overt political terms, took the lead. This secular alliance introduced the spark of change, lobbied for it and secured the support of public officials and key regime stakeholders. From this perspective, one can see why and how civil society was the leit motif of the reformist era.Footnote ⁹⁵

This assemblage of groups that belonged to different public and private organisations, including state representatives, medical experts, NGO workers and activists as well as international donors, contributed to the birth of the harm reduction system in a matter of less than a decade. Diachronic to this synchronic moment – the ‘great team’ referred to by a drug policy official – was the phenomenon of drugs and addiction in Iran, itself the result of global changes in the drug ecosystem. First with the ban of opium by the Taliban and then with its unprecedented expansion in the wake of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian state experienced a transformative and unpredictable reality to which it responded through a combination of security measures and technical knowledge. Both, one could argue, defied the image of the Islamic Republic as a religiously driven political machine and, instead, categorised a governmental approach, which adopted profane means and a secular mindset in dealing with issues of critical importance, with crises.

The making of the harm reduction policy is situated in a grey area between formal state institutions and societal (including international) agents. The case of harm reduction elucidates otherwise shady mechanisms of formulation of (controversial) policies, while also revealing meaningful aspects of Iran’s governmentality on crises. Crisis is an ordinary event in Iranian politics. Partly, the perpetual crisis is contingent of the revolutionary nature of the Iranian state; and partly, it is a loophole to quicken or slow down the process of reforms. President Khatami, whose government adopted the idiom of ‘reforms’, described his mandate as a period during which the government faced ‘a national crisis every nine days of government’.Footnote ⁹⁶ His reforms, too, adopted the idiom of the crisis, especially in the field of drugs policy.