Iran's Brutal War on Drugs

Up until the Islamic Revolution in 1979, opium smoking was an accepted if not completely respectable part of Iranian life. Many homes had "smoking" rooms and a good number of Iranians of all classes quietly enjoyed the enthralling pleasures of the poppy. But things changed with the arrival of the mullahs, and for the past two decades the Islamic Republic has waged an ever-escalating war on the opium traffic and its own opiate users.

The struggle is not merely a manifestation of Islamic puritanism. Neighboring Afghanistan, with its rural economy shattered by years of superpower struggles followed by civil war, emerged in the 1990s as the world's largest opium producer. While Iranian opium production, never high, declined to negligible levels, Afghani opium destined for the labs of Turkey and thence on to the end users of Europe flooded across Iran -- the most direct route to market. To cause Iranian authorities even more concern, two developments ensued: Afghani smugglers began refining heroin in-country, so it too joined the flood of opium, and an ever-larger portion of the traffic was feeding a growing army of domestic drug users, who complemented their fondness for opium with a quickly developing appreciation for the new-fangled stuff.

After twenty years of anti-opium efforts, the numbers are staggering: The Iranian government says more than 3,100 police and soldiers have been killed, along with more than 10,000 traffickers. Almost 200 soldiers and 800 traffickers were killed last year alone. Iran has spent nearly a billion dollars constructing a series of military outposts, walls, towers, roads and barriers along its 1,100 mile-long border with Afghanistan, a harsh and brutal terrain of deserts and mountains, and 30,000 troops are assigned to fight the drug trade. In the 1990s, Iranian authorities seized more than 1.7 million kilograms of drugs -- mostly opium and heroin -- according to the United Nations Drug Control Program, while the annual haul in recent years has averaged about 200 tons of opium and six tons of heroin.

The mullahs and the Revolutionary Courts have also given Iranian drug users a taste of their tender mercies. Drug possession, sales and trafficking are punished harshly, with penalties ranging from fines to lashings to imprisonment. (The US State Department, in its annual report on the drug trade, notes with approval that use of the lash has decreased in the past two years.) Possession of 30 grams of heroin or five kilos of opium can earn the death penalty, and Iranian courts have not been shy about exercising it, putting Iran in such fine company as China, Singapore, Thailand and the United States. The UNDCP estimated that Iran executed 130 drug offenders in the first half of last year, and Iranian officials say 800 more are on death row now.

Mohammed-Azam Teimouri hopes he doesn't join them. Interviewed by the Seattle Times in the Mashad Central Prison, where he awaits sentencing after being caught a year ago smuggling seven kilos of opium from Afghanistan, Teimouri said he was an impoverished farmer only trying to provide for his family. "I used to be a shepherd, a farmer, making my own living," he said. "Then there was the drought and I had nothing to feed my family. I was hungry, my children were hungry. A year ago a man, a rich Talibani, came and told me to take this to Iran. If only we could grow wheat and barley because this opium is a plague upon us in Afghanistan and a plague here in Iran, too."

He was promised $190 to deliver the drugs just across the border, he said. Teimouri is only one of thousands of Afghanis driven by poverty and drought to risk the wrath of the mullahs. That number should only increase as a Taliban decree this year effectively wiped out the Afghani opium crop, leaving an estimated 200,000 opium-growing families without income. Stockpiles of opium from previous bumper crops, however, continue to flood into Iran, according to Iranian and US officials, and weekly gun battles with smugglers continue.