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Maslahat, the state and the people: opium use in the Islamic Republic of Iran

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Abstract

This article tracks the development of opium use in present day Iran. Investigating how opium use is influenced by ideological change within the country, this paper intimately attempts to understand how Iranian intellectual, religious and national movements affected and still affect opium use. Working from an historicist approach, this paper furthermore investigates the changing response of the state to this opiate addiction. Analyzing the Islamic Republic's response to opiate-drug use is key in understanding how state policy decisions are influenced by and embedded within these ideological movements of a nation, and, specifically, how the Islamic Republic’s constitutional policy of maslahat allows for flexible legal strategies to combat drug control. Such an investigation is important, not only in understanding the etiology of Iranian policies of drug control and criminalization, but also in understanding how ideological movements affect an individual’s choice to use illegal substances.

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Notes

  1. These waves are identified by Iranian scholar, Kamrava, as working between the corners of a triangle of intellectual categories which include the conservative-religious, reformist-religious and secular-modernist. Thus, ideological shifts or intellectual changes will often be seen categorized under one of those three corners.

  2. Iran can still claim to have that romantic class called “intellectuals” whose ideas influence elite decisions and the masses in a discourse. The Iranian people are quite aware of political and philosophical discourses between intellectual elites. This engagement unfolds through circulating texts, from the pulpits of clerics or the podiums of professors and from the custom of discussion that pervades Iranian household culture.

  3. This history of the opium drug similarly reflects the history of the coca plant. In many Andean and Central American cultures, coca leaf was a popular self-medicating material. Moreover, it was very popular among the rural cultures, into the 20th century, where alternative medication was unavailable or where long days in the field necessitated a quick fix of energy, as “small doses” of the plant” received are beneficial in certain aspects of the arduous life at high altitudes” [6].

  4. The Spanish brought tobacco to China where tobacco smoking met opium use. The practice of smoking opium originated in China and eventually spread to Iran several centuries after the Spanish first introduced the tobacco plant to the Asian continent. [17].

  5. Development was visual rather than structural: cities were built up, but poverty hidden; women were unveiled merely to symbolically represent progression; sky scrapers symbolized magnanimous progress without deeper efforts to address to infrastructural sustainability.

  6. The practice of associating drugs with a cultural group, particularly a group that is potentially threatening to those in power, extends well beyond Iran. For example, Marek Kohn discusses the “category of person” who was expected to be a cocaine user at the turn of the century in London. In identifying the most likely users of cocaine, the drug became a symbol for a social group and, constitutively, the group became a symbol for the drug. Cocaine was “at the center of a discourse that used anxiety about delinquent drug use as a means of articulating deeper fears about” social change and “the drug panic was a spasm of reaction, as Britain struggled to come to terms with modernity.” Where British cocaine users forced other citizens to confront the reality of modernization and its implication for women’s freedom, youth freedom and sexual liberation, Iranian opium users were seen to inhibit the modernization of Iran that was based off the model of Western progress [12].

  7. Although the Revolution has been characterized by many as a populist movement [1] and the lower class being extolled as virtuous, including their illicit activity, we must remember that the new state was decidedly Islamic and under Islam opiate drugs are haraam.

  8. Khomeini writes, in Islamic Government, “That is our situation then- created for us by the foreigners through their propaganda and their agents. They have removed from operation all the judicial processes and political laws of Islam and replaced them with European importations, diminishing the chop of Islam and ousting it from Islamic society…we have thus sketched the subversive and corrupting plan of imperialism.”

  9. Drug use has often been used a nationalist tool across the globe, particularly among populist movements which emphasize the pastimes of the rural or indigenous population. Paul Gootenberg notes that some drugs, like the coca plant in Peru, attain “medical and national prestige” so that, during populist movements, the public often embraces the drug in a sort of nostalgic nationalism [8].

  10. This term originated with Al-e Ahmad’s work, titled “Gharbzadegji”.

  11. This is a Shi’i cleric who determined hokm for the people based on Islamic jurisprudential determination and which the people thus follow.

  12. Found in video, Drug use in Iran. (29 July 2008). Washington TV. Safha Asli. www.IranVNC.com.

  13. From the organization’s webpage:Jama’yat Ahyat e Insan e Kongra 60. (2003–2010). Congress 60 Humane Revivification Society. Iran.www.congress60.org

  14. Iranian border police on opium patrol. (26 June 2002). Al Jazeera News.

  15. Seen in a news special, Drug use in Iran. (29 July 2008). Washington TV. Safha Asli. www.IranVNC.com.

  16. Iranian commercial sponsored by DCHQ, Drug Control Headquarters. Aired in Tehran in 2004

References

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  17. Rudi Matthee.(2008). The Pursuit of Pleasure: Drugs and Stimulants in Iranian History, 1500–1900. Princeton and Oxford University Press. 99, 101, 106, 115, 212, 278

  18. Salehi, M. M. (1988). Insurgency Through Culture and Regligion: The Islamic Revolution of Iran. Madison Avenue New York, NY. Praeger. 55, 133

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  20. Washington TV. Safha Asli. (July 29 2008) “Drug use in Iran.” www.IranVNC.com.

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  1. Marquette University, Milwaukee, USA

    Lillian Figg-Franzoi

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Figg-Franzoi, L. Maslahat, the state and the people: opium use in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Crime Law Soc Change 56, 421–438 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-011-9326-1

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