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Drugs and Revolution in Iran: Islamic Devotion, Revolutionary Zeal and Republican Means

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Maziyar Ghiabi
Maziyar Ghiabi*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford and Wellcome Trust
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Abstract

On 27 June 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini declared, ‘drugs are prohibited” and 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 re-direction of Iran's previous approach to narcotic drugs, both in terms of production 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. Drugs and the politics surrounding them have been a crucial, yet neglected, aspect of the history of modern Iran that have changed the nature of the state bolstering its capacity of social intervention, while hindering its legitimacy, in the Pahlavi, as in the republican, era. By moving on “from the analysis of the state to a concern with the actualities of social subordination”, this article attempts to interpret how social subordination and state coercion were practiced and defied in the making of punishment and welfare in the social body of Iran.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , March 2015 , pp. 139 - 163
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 The International Society for Iranian Studies

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Footnotes

This article relied on Persian sources gathered during the summer 2012 while working as an intern at the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime in Tehran. There, I had access to a vast amount of sources and documentation, some of which is of great relevance for my research. In particular, Sa‘id Madani Qahfarkhi's collection of articles and publications for the UNODC on the issue of drugs and drug treatment between 1978 and 2001 (Bar-resi-ye tajārob-e modiriyyat-i kāhesh-e taqāzā-ye suye masraf-e mavvād-e tey-e do daheh-yi akhir (1358–1380), UNODC, Tehran, Autumn 2004) has been extremely useful. I had access to this database of scanned files and newspapers that I complemented with my own archival research in Tehran. Without Madani's previous collection and cataloguing of primary sources, my research would have been more limited in scope and less detailed in terms of historical coverage. While I benefited from access to these sources, I always used them independently from Madani's own work, which is cited extensively hereby and whose author's knowledge, I hope, has been sufficiently acknowledged in my work. My gratitude goes to the UNODC in Tehran and to Dr Stephanie Cronin who supervised my work and provided much insightful support. I am fully responsible for errors and views in this article.

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