[dramatic music playing]
When we think about policing the global heroin trade,
the picture is usually of smuggling on the US southern border
or international troops pulling up poppy fields in Afghanistan.
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However, more often than not,
some of the biggest seizures in the world
happen not in the US or Europe
but in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
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At the same time, opioid addiction is exploding across Iran,
adding to the country’s social and economic instability.
In 2021, a viral video showing men and women openly using drugs
in the nation’s capital, Tehran,
illustrated the scale of the problem.
[dramatic music playing]
This is how geography, global politics,
and the Islamic Republic’s own attempts at prohibition
have created what might be
the highest rates of opioid addiction in the world.
In 2017, Iranian troops and border guards
seized 630 tons of opium and 39 tons of heroin.
This represents around 25% of all heroin
and a staggering 90% of all opium seized in the world that year.
And this isn’t unusual.
Iran regularly intercepts
more opioids than most other countries combined.
According to the UN,
nobody has seized more opium-based drugs
than police in Iran—
$4 billion of it.
Modern recreational drugs
have a long and rich history in Iran.
Use of cannabis and opium in this part of the world
goes back basically to the dawn of recorded civilization.
But in 1978 and 1979, two key events changed everything.
First, there was the Islamic Revolution
in Iran itself.
Revolution in Iran.
A revolution that swept away all traces of the Shah’s regime
and ended an era.
On the surface, at least,
it was a revolution carried out in the name of Islam.
The 1979 revolution, the Islamic Revolution,
tried to purify Iran along very many different dimensions.
One of them is a return to the ban on both opium production
and opium use.
And so trafficking, of course, fills the void.
Then the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan,
which caused Afghan farmers to turn to the opium trade
as a means of survival and resistance.
Now we are in the context of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
The Soviets would be burning down orchards,
blowing up wells,
simply devastating agricultural production,
the core of the economy in Afghanistan.
Instead, the rural population very robustly switched to
the cultivation of opium poppy.
Afghanistan produces around 90% of the world's illicit opium,
and Iran and Afghanistan share a 572-mile border,
which makes it ideal for drug smuggling.
Within Iran itself, the government enforces
strict Islamic behavioral codes,
limiting how different genders can mix
and imposing a total ban on alcohol.
Perhaps unsurprisingly,
illicit drug offenses also carry severe penalties.
In Iran, being caught with 30 kilos of cannabis
or five kilos of heroin carries the death penalty.
In 2015, rates of execution for drug-related crimes
hit a peak of 725.
All in all, 70% of prisoners
in Iran’s notoriously harsh prison system
are there for drug offenses.
And these laws tend to fall
disproportionately on minority groups,
particularly the marginalized ethnic Baloch community.
There have even been reports of Baloch villages
where the entire male adult population
has been executed on drug charges.
Harsh punishments, including death sentences,
have failed to lower drug production in Iran.
The country burns about 100 tons of seized narcotics each year.
[When] the Islamic regime came to power,
it initially adopted very draconian policies:
imprisonment of users,
no provision of treatment, and execution of drug traffickers.
By 2004/2005,
Iran had one of the highest imprisonment rates
for drug use in the world.
But this harsh regime has utterly failed to stop
the spread of addiction.
Iran has up to 4 million regular drug users,
meaning about 2.8% of the entire population.
According to UN calculations,
this actually gives Iran the highest per capita rate
of problematic drug use in the entire world.
Every city in Iran has back alleys like this one,
full of desperate addicts and their dealers,
who sell the cheap drugs that flood across the border from Afghanistan.
Many may find it hard to believe that
such a socially conservative country,
where booze is banned,
could have such a high rate of opioid use.
Yet, these two forms of drug prohibition
may actually be connected.
And that is a complex debate,
not just in Iran but across the Middle East,
about the relationship between alcohol use and drug use.
Then the fact that people find it difficult to have access to alcohol,
they can’t access alcohol illegally,
is driving some people to use drugs instead.
It’s not simply restrictions to alcohol,
more broadly just severe restrictions on social fulfillment.
[music playing]
In the 1990s and early 2000s,
there did seem to be a glimmer of hope
in Iranian drug policy.
In response to the HIV crisis,
the government surprised the world
by instituting more methadone programs
and harm reduction initiatives.
However, as the hardline government
of former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
swept to power in 2005,
funding for these programs declined,
and the government seemed to double down
on the puritanical war on drugs approach.
Iran has just celebrated the 30th anniversary of the revolution.
President Ahmadinejad is trying to return to
what he sees as a pure form of Islam.
In Iran, there are still some drug treatment programs
that do apply evidence-based treatments,
like opioid substitution therapy.
However, these suffer from chronic underfunding,
and there are many other rehab facilities
that appear closer to torture chambers.
There are widespread reports of drug users being savagely beaten
and immersed in freezing water to punish them out of addiction.
Get out of the way.
Why are you being disrespectful around here?
I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
Needless to say, this is not an effective form of treatment,
and people often fall back into problematic drug use
as soon as they’re released.
The iron law of drug prohibition
is that users and dealers tend to move towards
stronger and stranger drugs.
Iran has been marked by a steady shift from opium to heroin,
and there are now increasing reports
of more crystal meth use and production.
The larger problem is simply the lack of funding for it,
which will obviously affect poorer Iranians
far greater than wealthier ones.
Another universal fact of the war on drugs is corruption.
In authoritarian regimes, there can be even greater scope
for this corruption to take hold.
In Iran, the Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC,
are an ultra-powerful paramilitary force
directly loyal to the Ayatollah.
[military music and shouting]
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps
is Iran’s most elite and influential military force
and has strong connections with Iran’s regime.
The IRGC have grown in power over decades of Islamic rule
and now control large parts of the Iranian economy.
But what’s true of the legitimate economy
is also true of the criminal economy.
And there are allegations that elements of
the Revolutionary Guards themselves
are deeply embedded in Iranian drug trafficking networks.
There have been reports of the IRGC protecting traffickers,
even as they smuggle kilos of heroin
on buses taking pilgrims to Islamic holy sites.
In any country that has significant illegal economies,
there is corruption of officers or institutions.
So you have countries where controlling illegal economies
becomes a purposeful, designated source of funding
for a military entity or for the regime.
Iran has experienced years of economic turmoil.
And in recent months, protests have rocked the country,
with women taking to the streets to resist the regime's morality police.
Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979,
the Iranian regime has required all women to wear a headscarf
and loose-fitting clothing.
[sirens wailing, explosive bang]
Iran’s rulers are cracking down hard.
Dozens of protesters have been killed,
hundreds arrested, and the internet choked off.
[dramatic music playing]
And the Iranian heroin epidemic
is yet another deep crisis facing the country.
Iran and the US don’t tend to agree on much,
but perhaps in fatally mismanaging an opioid crisis,
they may finally have found something in common.
We’d like to congratulate drugs
for winning the war on drugs.