Maintaining disorder: the micropolitics of drugs policy in Iran

Abstract

This article analyses the ways in which the state ‘treats’ addiction among precarious drug (ab)users in Iran. While most Muslim-majority as well as some Western states have been reluctant to adopt harm reduction measures, the Islamic Republic of Iran has done so on a nationwide scale and through a sophisticated system of welfare intervention. Additionally, it has introduced devices of management of ‘addiction’ (the ‘camps’) that defy statist modes of punishment and private violence. What legal and ethical framework has this new situation engendered? And what does this new situation tell us about the governmentality of the state? Through a combination of historical analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, the article analyses the paradigm of government of the Iranian state with regard to disorder as embodied by the lives of poor drug (ab)users.

Keywords:

• Iran
• ethnography of the state
• addiction
• civil society
• drugs
• micropolitics

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the comments and advice of the participants of the Symposium ‘Drugs, Politics and Society in the Global South’ held in Oxford in October 2016. My gratitude goes also to the Wellcome Trust which enabled this research to take place. Moreover, I would like to thank Dennis Rodgers, Rasmus Christian Elling, Pablo Howard Seward Delaporte, Stephanie Cronin, Mitra Asfari, Jim Mills, Billie Jeanne Brownlee, Rafa Gude and Fariba Adelkhah, for their critical comments on parts of and ideas discussed in this article. Special thanks also the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, particularly to Gelareh Mostahshari, who provided very useful comments on a draft of this article. I am also grateful to Sean Rothman and Shahid Qader for their editorial assistance in the preparation of the Special Issue. All errors are my sole responsibility.

Notes

‡ Present address: Postdoctoral Fellow at EHESS, Paris.

1. A Persian proverb equivalent to ‘Don’t count your chickens before they hatch’.

2. Accounts of Harandi Parks also appeared in newspapers. See Iran, October 5, 2015.

3. This model could potentially develop into something similar to Sao Paulo’s De Braços Abertos project in Crackolandia; see Prefertura da Cidade de São Paulo, ‘O Programa do Braços Abertos’, available at https://www.prefeitura.sp.gov.br/cidade/secretarias/upload/saude/DBAAGO2015.pdf

4. Deleuze, Due Regimi di Folli e Altri Scritti, 3.

5. See Garcia, Pastoral Clinic; Zigon, HIV Is God’s Blessing; Raikhel and Garriott, Addiction Trajectories.

6. Similarly, a police officer during the Great 8 (G8) in Genoa in 2001 asserted that the government did not want the police to establish order, but to maintain the disorder. Reported by Agamben, “Comment l’Obsession Sécuritaire Fait Muter.”

7. I am grateful to Fariba Adelkhah for pointing out this aspect.

8. This is different from the French case described by Fassin, where activists as well as Sarkozy himself who opposed these places used the word ‘camp’ instead of ‘centre’ to delegitimise them. In Fassin, Humanitarian Reason, 133–4.

9. Rehabilitation in these centres follows the 12-step process established by NA. Most of the camp managers and assistants are also members of NA and the camps often have logos and banners indicating their affiliation to the NA superstructure. Based on ethnographic observations in rehab camps in several Iranian cities, 2012–2016.

10. Interview with the manager of a camp in the village around Arak, 2 April 2014.

11. Interview in Hasanabad, April 3, 2014.

12. Keyhan, June 10, 2012.

13. This is the official government data and it has been stable over the last few decades, despite significant changes in the drug market and evidence of a rise in drugs use. There are other estimates, at times declared by government officials themselves, which refer to higher numbers, eg 2–5 million; see United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC), “Drug Prevention Treatment and HIV AIDS,” https://www.unodc.org/islamicrepublicofiran/drug-prevention-treatment-and-hiv-aids.html

14. Ghiabi, “Drugs, Addiction and the State,” chapter 6.

15. All Iranian legislations are discussed in Parliament with the exception of drug laws, which are legislated exclusively in the Expediency Council.

16. Calabrese, “Iran’s War on Drugs.”

17. DCHQ, “Drug Control in 2009.”

18. The text of the General Policies can be found on the website of the Expediency Council, available at https://maslahat.ir/DocLib2/Approved%20Policies/Offered%20General%20Policies.aspx

19. Interview with Tahernokhost, Tehran, September 2012; and interview with Emran Razzaghi, Tehran, September 2012.

20. For instance, the increase of reckless driving and lunatic behaviour in public, described in journalistic pieces, hints at this. See Aftab-e Yazd, August 30, 2008. For stories about shisheh, which went viral, see Mehr, December 22, 2012, available at https://www.mehrnews.com/news/1770270/; and Sharq, November 3, 2013, available at https://sharghdaily.ir/1392/08/14/Files/PDF/13920814-1874-22-12.pdf

21. These operations are usually called nejat, ‘salvation’, and prior to 2010 they contemplated incarceration for short periods.

22. In the presidential election of May 2017, the issue of marginalisation became a central theme. Addiction was a key category of this debate; for a discussion of the category of ‘lumpen’, see Denning, “Wageless Life.” One could see how the addiction camps are the postmodern equivalent of the lazzaretti and lazzaroni, the leper hospital and leper.

23. Mehr, September 26, 2012, available at https://www.mehrnews.com/news/1608510/

24. Iran, May 12, 2007.

25. Ethnographic observation while working as a research intern at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, September 2012. Accounts available also in Tabnak, September 12, 2012, available at https://www.tabnak.ir/fa/news/272411

26. A similarity that is reminiscent of the 1980s approach; see Ghiabi, “Drugs and Revolution in Iran.”

27. Hamshahri, April 30, 2008.

28. Ibid.

29. After 2009, incidentally, the head of the DCHQ was Mostafa Najjar, then Interior Minister.

30. Jam-e Jam, February 28, 2011, available at https://www1.jamejamonline.ir/papertext.aspx?newsnum=100836959206

31. Ibid.

32. Jam-e Jam, May 16, 2011.

33. In Article 42 of the Reformed 2010 Drugs Law; the text is available at https://rc.majlis.ir/fa/law/show/99642

34. Salamat News, May 8, 2012.

35. Tabnak, February 8, 2013 available at https://www.tabnak.ir/fa/news/301709

36. International Center for Prison Studies, World Prison Population List, 2013, available at https://www.apcca.org/uploads/10th_Edition_2013.pdf

37. Eqtesad News, February 11, 2017, available at https://www.eghtesadnews.com; It is said that up to 80% of death sentences are due to drug trafficking charges. See Sharq, August 8, 2010.

38. He was Minister of Interior between 2005 and 2008, and is the Minister of Justice in Rouhani’s current government.

39. Ruzegar-e Ma, August 27, 2011.

40. Hamshahri, January 22, 2009.

41. Behrouzan, “Epidemic of Meanings.”

42. Jam-e Jam, April 11, 2010; The equivalent of ca. US$150,000 per day.

43. Hamshahri, April 30, 2009.

44. Aftab News, June 16, 2011, available at https://aftabnews.ir/prtb89b8wrhb5fp.uiur.html

45. For the Iranian case, see Mardomsalari, September 22, 2012; For an ethnographic study of French police strategies and governmentality, see Fassin, La Force de l'Ordre. A discussion of morality and the police instead can be found in Fassin, “Maintaining Order”.

46. Fassin, Humanitarian Reason, 135.

47. Christensen, Drugs, Deviancy and Democracy.

48. In a decade, the number of female drug ‘addicts’ has almost doubled, according to the DCHQ; see Fararu, August 2, 2016, available at https://fararu.com/fa/news/283802/

49. Hamshahri, June 24, 2009.

50. Sharq, July 24, 2012.

51. Scott, James C. Seeing like a State.

52. Khabaronline, June 10, 2011, available at https://www.khabaronline.ir/print/156388/

53. A good example is Khaneh-ye Khorshid, which had collaborated with the state in providing welfare services to sex workers in Tehran.

54. On this oxymoronic figure, see the ‘detoxified addicted’ in Deleuze, Due Regimi di Folli e Altri Scritti, 119.

55. Statistical Center of Iran, available at https://www.amar.org.ir

56. I later came to learn that this story was also widely reported in the news. See Sharq, September 24, 2012.

57. For a discussion of ‘government at distance’, see Hibou, Privatizing the State, 15.

58. Hamshahri, May 4, 2008.

59. Hamshahri, March 9, 2010. The Welfare Organisation has an ad hoc office for drug addiction, which issues these licences.

60. Ibid.

61. Ibid.

62. Interview with Hamid-Reza Tahernokhost, Drug Demand Reduction, UNODC, Tehran, September 2012.

63. Interview with Hasan Solhi, head of a state-run clinic in Arak, March 2014.

64. Jam-e Jam, May 16, 2011.

65. Hamshahri, January 25, 2010.

66. Ethnographic notes in popular neighbourhoods of Shush, Dowlatabad, in Tehran; and Futbal, Cheshm-e Mushak, in Arak. See also Jam-e Jam, April 16, 2012.

67. Interview with Tahernokhost, September 2012.

68. Interview with a former police officer in Arak, September 2014. There is a telling comparison with the work of the Red Cross in the French migration centre of Sangette (later the ‘Jungle’), where the aid workers are found policing the centre instead of the police who have an ‘almost benevolent attitude’. See Fassin, Humanitarian Reason, 139.

69. Andisheh-ye Nou, October 12, 20009; Salamat News, October 22, 2013, available at https://www.salamatnews.com/news/85137/

70. For an overview, see Tabnak, December 25, 2013, available at https://www.tabnak.ir/fa/news/366881

71. The public diatribe can be read here: Azad News Agency, April 25, 2016, available at https://www.ana.ir/news/98756

72. Etemad-e Melli, June 11, 2009.

73. Intervention by DCHQ official Hami Sarrami at the Addiction Studies Conference, Tehran, September 2015.

74. Shore, Wright, and Però, Policy Worlds, 114.

75. Jam-e Jam, December 19, 2010.

76. Shore, Wright, and Però, Policy Worlds, 14, 114.

77. See also Jam-e Jam, December 19, 2010.

78. Navaro-Yashin, Faces of the State, 119 and 134.

79. Haeri, Law of Desire.

80. Najmabadi, Professing Selves. The cost of the entire process is covered by the Welfare Organisation.