Drugs, Society and the State in Iran

With the Islamic Revolution of Iran in 1979, the place of opium changed dramatically. This doesn't mean that the Pahlavi monarchy had a quite lenient approach. Opium trafficking, drug trafficking was met with the death sentence. But the Islamic Republic adopts it as a symbol of the ancien régime of the Shah. And many of the executions and persecutions of people in the 1980s happened because of drug charges.

Drugs become associated with political infidelity, if you can call it as such, or ideological unruliness, and a national threat. Very famously, the Ayatollah, the first supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, said that after the Iran-Iraq war, the main public concern is that of drugs. So drugs really represent in Iranian history, both before and after the revolution, quite an important site of policy experimentation and also of ethical negotiations between what is the state and what kind of idea of citizenship that state wants to promote.

The same type of event happened in the 2000s, when new substances, including methamphetamine and crack, became widely available in Iran. The availability of these substances goes hand in hand with increasing mobility among people. Many of the Iranians who familiarized themselves with crystal meth, for instance, had traveled to Southeast Asia, to Thailand in particular; and Iran being a country of chemists and scientists, it didn't take them long to learn the recipe and then bring it back to Iran.

With widespread unemployment, many students with knowledge of scientific practices such as chemistry have often found easy revenue in producing high-quality meth. Methamphetamine became, from the mid-2000s up to the present, one of the most popular substances in Iran, which, if you look at our general perception of the Orient or of Iran and Central Asia in particular, as places where mostly opium and heroin are consumed, is quite surprising.

Meth today represents a very key component of public culture, both in terms of the fear of drugs, but also in the way drugs play in that game, which is capitalism and productivity. Methamphetamines in particular increase mobility, increase alertness, increase the desire for sexual pleasure — all elements that by the mid-2000s and indeed following that in the 2010s become key elements of what a good life should look like.

Being embedded in a community, a large number of people that live in this southern part of Tehran, at the crossroad of various boulevards, exposed me to a number of truths that otherwise would never be seen. The way, for instance, drug users, who often were homeless, had communities of self-help and mutual aid — something that we often think impossible when we look at the sort of individualistic, predatory idea of a drug user or so-called addict. But also the kind of cultural world of addiction, which is not only about procuring substances for one's chronic habit, but also reciting poetry, drawing, and jokes — all of these were kind of key elements to the life of drug users there.

This is a body that was created informally in the early 80s and then was enshrined in the Constitution in 1988, and which is made of the highest-ranking political figures of the Islamic Republic, coming from all branches of power, and appointed, some of them, directly by the Supreme Leader. It's a body that discusses matters of expediency of the state. These are matters that cut across different fields, from security to jurisprudence, to health, to education, to prevention, and so on. And this body sees various figures, all with some expert opinion supporting the work, trying to find solutions to public challenges. Specifically, drug issues have always been dealt with through legislation approved by this body, which is, if we want to think of a comparative model, something akin to, but not exactly the same as, the Conseil d'État in France.

When it comes to Iran, the lexicon has been strongly technical, strongly driven by public health approaches, especially when it comes to drug consumption and addiction. Quite different is the case of drug trafficking, which Iran sees as a national security threat because it's related to ethnic minorities in Baluchistan, who are often tied to separatist movements — or at least that's how the state frames them.

To learn a lesson from Iran would be that, in spite of all the constraints, the Islamic Republic has been able to implement harm reduction policies, which are a set of policies that are aimed not exclusively at getting rid of drugs from public life, which is an impossible task, but to make sure that if drug use happens, it happens in a safe way. Distributing clean needles to people who inject drugs, providing condoms to sex workers even though premarital sex is illegal in the Islamic Republic, providing needles and substitution therapies for opiates in prisons, and therefore acknowledging the fact that within a prison setting — a highly securitized environment — drugs are still available, and therefore fundamentally acknowledging that it is impossible to extrapolate drugs from public life. All of these are things that have happened in the Islamic Republic, in spite of the religious and clerical control that there is in public discourse and public life. Often we see this not happening in the so-called liberal world, and perhaps there is a lesson to be learned from that.

Most pains, most challenges that chronic drug users and so-called addicts come to face come from political police repression, prison, and health challenges caused by the fact that substances are adulterated and contaminated, and by the fact that drugs are often expensive and therefore cause a downfall in the economic life of an individual, with all the implications that a downfall in economic life means — becoming homeless, having debt. The problem of drugs often ends up being a problem about something else: about money, about housing, about being stigmatized by your people, by your community. If we manage to think of it holistically, then we see that perhaps the smallest part of the issue is drugs, and the bigger part has to do with capital.

Editor’s note: This article has been faithfully transcribed from the original interview filmed with the author, and carefully edited and proofread. Edit date: 2026