Iran has one of the world’s highest rates of drug addiction, estimated to be between two and seven per cent of the entire population. This makes the questions this book asks all the more salient: what is the place of illegal substances in the politics of modern Iran? How have drugs affected the formation of the Iranian state and its power dynamics? And how have governmental attempts at controlling and regulating illicit drugs affected drug consumption and addiction? By answering these questions, Maziyar Ghiabi suggests that the Islamic Republic’s image as an inherently conservative state is not only misplaced and inaccurate, but in part a myth. In order to dispel this myth, he skilfully combines ethnographic narratives from drug users, vivid field observations from ‘under the bridge’, with archival material from the pre- and post-revolutionary era, statistics on drug arrests and interviews with public officials. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core at doi.org/10.1017/9781108567084.

Contents

• [Dedication]
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Transliteration
• Persian Glossary
• English Glossary
• Prologue
  • ‘Not the King but the Minister … Not the Law but the Police …’
  • 1. The Drug Assemblage
    • Introduction
    • Apparatuses: Addiction, Treatment, Harm Reduction
    • Dealing with Data: Allegories, Disorders, Methods
    • Conclusions
• Part One
  • 2. A Genealogy of Drugs Politics: Opiates under the Pahlavi
    • Introduction
    • Modernity and Addiction
    • State Building on Drugs
    • War, Coups d’État and International Drug Control (1941–55)
    • Opium Prohibition and Westoxification: (1955–69)
    • Iranizing Prohibition?
    • Conclusions
  • 3. Drugs, Revolution, War
    • Introduction
    • Tabula Rasa: the Islamic Paladin Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali
    • The Imposed Wars: Iraq and Drugs (1980–88)
    • The Quarantine
    • Drug Paranoia and the Politics of Suspicion
    • Popular Mobilisation against Illicit Drugs
    • After the War (1988–97): Policy Reconstruction and Medicalisation
    • Conclusions
  • 4. Reformism and Drugs: Formal and Informal Politics of Harm Reduction
    • Introduction
    • Crisis as an Idiom for Reforms
    • Harm Reduction: Underground, Bottom-Up and ‘Lights Off’
    • The State – Driving with the Lights Off
    • Conclusions
• Interregnum
  • 5. Crisis as an Institution: The Expediency Council
    • Introduction
    • Where Does Expediency Stand? Constitutional Revisions and Governmental Ordinances
    • The Genesis of the Expediency Council
    • ‘Gazing Eye, Thoughtful Brain’: Structures & Powers
    • The Expediency Council on Drug Policy
    • Conclusions
• Part Two
  • 6. The Anthropological Mutation of Methamphetamines
    • Introduction
    • Addictions, Social Change, and Globalisation
    • The ‘Crisis’ of Shisheh and Its Narratives
    • Sex, Sex Workers and HIV
    • The Disease of the Psyche
    • Conclusions
  • 7. The Art of Managing Disorder
    • Introduction
    • The 2010 Drug Law Reform
    • Therapeutic Police: Compulsory Treatment Camps
    • Private Recovery Camps
    • Illegal Treatment: ‘The Hand that Captures the Snake’
    • A Site of Disorder: Harandi Park
    • Conclusions: The Art of Managing Disorder
  • 8. Drugs and Populism: Ahmadinejad and Grassroots Authoritarianism
    • Introduction
    • ‘A National Question, Not a Governmental Duty’
    • Harm Reduction Revisited
    • The Plateau of Ten Thousands NGOs
    • Rebirth: Grassroots Authoritarianism and Twilight Institutions
    • Conclusions
• Epilogue
  • Power, Crisis, Drugs
• Select Bibliography

First published 2019

maziyar ghiabi is an Italian/Iranian social scientist, ethnographer and historian, currently a lecturer at the University of Oxford and Titular Lecturer at Wadham College. Prior to this position, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Paris School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) and a member of the Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire des Enjeux Sociaux (IRIS). After finishing his BA and MA at the University of Ca’ Foscari Venice, he obtained a Doctorate in Politics at the University of Oxford (St Antony’s College) where he was a Wellcome Trust Scholar in Society and Ethics (2013–17). His interest falls at the crossroads of different disciplinary and intellectual fields, from medical anthropology to politics to modern social history across the Middle East and the Mediterranean. He is the editor of Power and Illicit Drugs in the Global South (Routledge, 2018).

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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108475457

DOI: 10.1017/9781108567084

When citing this work, please include a reference to the

DOI 10.1017/9781108567084

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ghiabi, Maziyar, 1986– author.

Title: Drugs politics : managing disorder in the Islamic Republic of Iran / Maziyar Ghiabi.

Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom : Cambridge University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019001098 | ISBN 9781108475457 (alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Drug control – Iran. | Drug abuse – Iran. | Drug abuse – Government policy – Iran.

Classification: LCC HV5840.I68 G48 2019 | DDC 362.29/15610955–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001098