Ontological journeys: The lifeworld of opium across the Afghan-Iranian border in/out of the pharmacy

Abstract

How can we conceive alternative policy models that embrace the empirical potentialities emerging from the lifeworld of drugs? The article reflects on this question, concluding that to reassess and to reinvent current policies on drugs, we need to think with a political ontology. Incidentally, the article also responds to the critique dismissing ontological inquiries as obstructing – or, at best, not informing – alternative drug policies. In an archaeological approach inspired by the work of Giorgio Agamben, the article unearths the case study of opium maintenance programme in Iran (1969–79), a forgotten policy experiment in an understudied and yet crucial geo-cultural environment for the global study of drugs. Mobilising the conceptual framework of ontological journeys, the article recomposes the lifeworld of opium within the horizons of transformative cultural practices, international borders, policy regimes and public ethics. Here, the materiality of drug consumption under the maintenance policy links with the changes in opium’s transnational political economy and with shifting regimes of health and bioethical orthodoxy. Ontological journeys, hence, develop in a fluid space and time, making it possible to illuminate the lifeworld of drugs in places and times hitherto deserted by global policy studies. In building theoretical reflections upon a non-Western case, the article also incites the possibility of theory beyond Eurocentric knowledge and Euromerican cases. In this way, the article’s purpose is to analyse the be-coming of opium beyond ‘good’ or ‘evil’, as a ‘medicine’ or a ‘drug’ and its real or perceived classification as ‘licit’ or ‘illicit’ across the Afghan-Iranian border. In conclusion, the article reflects upon the significance of this forgotten policy experiment, understood as an ontological journey, for contemporary drug policy and drug studies, but also for reinventing notions of care, welfare and health.

Introduction

How can we conceive alternative policy models that embrace the empirical potentialities emerging from the lifeworld of drugs? The article reflects on this question, concluding that to reassess and to reinvent current policies on drugs, we need to think with a political ontology. Incidentally, it responds to the critique dismissing ontological inquiries as obstructing – or, at best, not informing – alternative drug policies (Stevens, 2020). In an archaeological approach inspired by the work of Giorgio Agamben (Agamben, 2008, 2012, 2014), the article unearths the case study of opium maintenance programme in the context of Iran (1969–79), a forgotten policy experiment in an understudied and yet crucial geo-cultural environment for the global study of drugs. Mobilising the conceptual framework of ontological journeys, the article recomposes the lifeworld of opium within the horizons of transformative cultural practices, international borders, policy regimes and public ethics. Here, the materiality of drug consumption under the opium maintenance policy links with the changes in opium’s transnational political economy and with shifting regimes of health and biological orthodoxy (Foucault, 1972). Ontological journeys, hence, illuminate the lifeworld of opium in places and times hitherto deserted by global drug policy studies. In building theoretical reflections upon a non-Western case, the article also incites the possibility of theory beyond Eurocentric knowledge and Euromerican cases.

The article proceeds through three main sections: firstly, it provides a short overview of the opium maintenance policy and its regulatory implications within and without Iran, which aims to familiarise the reader with an unusual policy; then, it discusses the theoretical and methodological coordinates distilled via Agamben’ political ontology on forms-of-life (Agamben & Bonacci, 2019), situating them in light of the ‘ontological turn’ in drug studies; finally, the article follows opium’s ontological journeys through semantic, politico-economic, policy, and bio-ethical motions.

Rather than reifying illicit drugs or fetishizing them as onedimensional objects imbued with clear-cut moralities (Duff, 2013; Fraser & Moore, 2011b; Ghiabi, 2018c; Richert, 2019), the article follows opium’s ontological journeys across different regulatory spaces and times. These journeys required boundary crossing into the territorial borders of nation-states, such as the Afghan-Iranian border; the temporal border of before and after the Iranian Revolution of 1979; the regulatory borders of (il)legality of opium; the ethical borders of (il)licit opium consumption. Each of these boundaries entailed different gate-keepers and brokers that organised and attempted control over the mobility of opium from one space to the other. All together, opium flowed across these realities as a multifarious being, an object multiple (Dwyer & Moore, 2013; Mol, 2002; Rhodes, Azbel, Lancaster, & Meyer, 2019). In this way, the article’s purpose is to analyse the be-coming of opium beyond ‘good’ or ‘evil’, as a ‘medicine’ or a ‘drug’ and its real or perceived classification as ‘licit’ or ‘illicit’ across the Afghan-Iranian border. In conclusion, the article reflects upon the significance of this forgotten policy experiment, understood as an ontological journey, for contemporary drug policy and drug studies, but also for reinventing notions of care, welfare and health.

The opium maintenance policy, 1969-79

In 1969, the Iranian government shelved its policy stance on opium prohibition – embraced under the US aegis in 1955 – and implemented a nationwide plan on opium maintenance based on domestic production. This occurred within the boundaries of international drug conventions, since the UN-mandated 1953 Opium Protocol recognised Iran’s right to a legal quota for opium production, together with six other states: Bulgaria, Greece, India, Turkey, USSR and Yugoslavia (UN 1953). The policy on opium maintenance created a new regulatory space, affecting the ontology of opium within a transnational space, from Afghanistan to Turkey, two of the world’s major sources of illegal opium trade.

Iranian opium became a medicine available upon presentation of a doctor’s prescription and purchasable in pharmacies throughout the country. People over sixty years of age could obtain it in recognition of opium’s powerful antioxidant, analgesic and pain management virtues. While contested by parts of the scientific community, especially foreign-based drug/addiction researchers, opium returned to its longstanding place in Iranian pharmacopeia, seen as medical, but not quite a medicine. More than 200,000 people, across different generations and social classes, registered on the state-sanctioned opium maintenance programme (Consultative Assembly 1969b [1347]). The policy represented a radical alternative to the emerging policy model of the ‘War on Drugs’ and drug-free world, embraced since the 1970s by the US administrations of Richard Nixon and escalated under Ronald Regan. It was a political ontological intervention in matters of drugs.

A decade later, amidst the upheaval of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the Islamist revolutionary cadres reversed the medical opium policy and reinstated it as rooted in an ‘evil ethics’ with no medical value (Jomhuri-ye Eslami, 1979). Ever since, opium, and its transregional economy originating in Afghanistan’s poppy fields, has grown relentlessly (Farrell & Thorne, 2005; Goodhand, 2005; Mansfield, 2016) and opiate (as well as methamphetamines) consumption has increased to new record levels (Barr & Noroozi, 2013; Ghiabi, 2019 Moradi et al., 2019; Sharifi et al., 2017). And, since the 1980s, Iran has seized more opiates than any other country with up to 80% and 30% respectively of all of the world’s opium and heroin seizures (Robins, 2016; United Nations Office on Drugs & Crime 2010; United Nations Office on Drugs & Crime 2019). The country has also adopted harm reduction-orientated policies on Opioids Substitution Treatment (OST) (Ekhtiari, 2020; Ghiabi, 2019; 2018; Nissaramanesh, Trace & Roberts, 2005; Roshanfekr, Farnia & Dejman, 2013) which fall short of becoming an ontological intervention on the quiddity of opium.

Theoretical approach

Since the 2010s, drug and alcohol studies, following a broader trend in the social sciences, have taken an ‘ontological turn’ (Woolgar & Lezaun, 2015). The core question of this philosophical school – in spite of the many voices animating it – is what substances become and how we constitute them as objects of study (Fraser, 2020). This emerging scholarship is heavily indebted to the works of Bruno Latour and John Law on Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and the abolition of the object/subject/context divide (Duff, 2017; Mol, 2002; Dwyer & Moore, 2013; Fraser, 2020; Latour, 1999; Law, 1999; Law & Lien, 2013; Rhodes et al., 2019). Substances become ontologically different when participating in differing webs of relations. For example, Duff explores this with the case of cannabis: an illicit drug for law enforcers, a medicine for registered patients in States where this is lawful and a nondrug for regular consumers who see its consumption as ordinary and not deviant (2017).

Within the ontological school of thought, several scholars have highlighted the saliency of the ontological politics (or ontopolitics) of drugs, first defined by Anne-Marie Mol, as a ‘composite term’ which suggests that ‘the conditions of possibility [we live with] are not given’ and ‘that reality is rather shaped within these practices’ (Dwyer & Moore, 2013; Mol, 1999). Here the object of drugs and drug policy is not ‘finished’ or ‘ready-made’ (Lancaster & Rhodes, 2020). Instead, the conditions of possibility is where the reality of policy comes to matter as a form of ‘ontological intervention’: how thinking about drug policy constitutes the problem of drugs, and not how the problem(s) of drugs trigger policy responses (Fraser & Moore, 2011a; Lancaster, 2016, 2015).

Authors adopting ontological approaches are informed by the scholarship on Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and have hitherto largely worked on consumption and health dimensions in the Western countries (UK, US, France, Australia), with some exceptions (Rhodes, 2018; Rhodes et al., 2019). This article seeks to establish a dialogue with this emergent scholarship, while it introduces the notion of ontological journeys.

Movement is the essence of being in the world (Agamben, 2012; Nail, 2018). Ontological journeys are motion in the lifeworld of being. A lifeworld is the simple possibility and potentiality in the existence of things, as they are and as they could be. Movement, in this sense, is akin to possibility, the potential of change or the simultaneity of being. It is the economic, ethical, health and policy dimensions in its forms of life. The web of material and discursive relations produces the ontological journeys. This approach shares what Cameron Duff described as ‘assemblage thinking’, where the individual subject is removed as a unit of analysis and ‘replaced with a logic of relations, affects and materials...’ (2016). However, the unit of analysis in the ontological journeys is not that of the drug-body-context nexus; rather, it is the fluid movement from the plant cultivation, the border checkpoints, the distributional networks to the regulatory regimes, consumers’ practice and health services, all of which co-constitute the lifeworld of drugs. An ontological journey conceives of drugs as forms-of-life that always fall short of being appropriated and that can only be understood as an approximation. In this, it resembles more an ‘assemblic ethnography’ approach (Zigon, 2018), but inclusive of historical experience.

This lifeworld is mobile and transitioning with language/discourses, politics/policy, space/time, and public ethics. Gilles Deleuze claimed that ‘clearly no one know[s] what to do with drugs, not even the users. But no one knows how to talk about them either’ (Biehl, 2010; Deleuze 2003). Journey is at the same time metaphor (language/discourse) and reality (materiality, being), a way of thinking drugs and a way of being drugs. In this, following Agamben’s philosophy of names, the question is what happens to the things of the world because of the existence of names, such as ‘drugs’, ‘opium’, etc.. As explored in the semantic section of the article, names are not simple signifiers; names are a way of being of what is named. To echo it with Agamben, the name is ‘an ontological attribute of the thing [della cosa] and not an external label’ (Agamben, 2014; Coccia, 2017).

Thus, the journey be-comes at the crossroad of language, polity, and ethics – all of which belong to its lifeworld. But these journeys are not parallel tracks, proceeding without intersection. Their encounter reveals itself in changing policies and practices shaping realities, where, paraphrasing Mol, ontology ‘is implicated in the political and vice versa’ (1999). Rather than talking like a state and embracing bureaucratic discourses on (il)licitness (Gootenberg, 2009; Van Schendel & Abraham, 2005), ontological journeys account for the coterminous multiplicity of ways of being in the world. In this way, they also reveal the political potentiality of understanding drugs in their multiple realities, which in turn requires ontological interventions (Rhodes et al., 2019). Ontological journeys, eventually, aim at opening up material potentialities for drug policy, because they make possible alternative lifeworlds for drugs, rather than a change in the political ends of policy.

Methodology

Ontological journeys are transdisciplinary, because they don’t follow discipline. They can flow quodUbet, ‘in whatever way possi-ble’(Agamben, 2003).

Drawing from a range of fields (history, policy and political studies, development, anthropology and STS), this approach seeks to transition beyond discipline-specific outcomes (and language) to explore real-world, empirical questions with a conceptual and methodological baggage, in this case, within the medical humanities (Evans & Mac-naughton, 2004; Fitzgerald & Callard, 2016; Whitehead, 2016). Trans-disciplinary approaches help to produce forms of knowledge that engage across the scientific community (at the price of disciplinary criticism) and with realities that are often relevant to the public for the questions it asks are multidimensional. The movement of ideas (and theories) from one discipline to the other becomes the foundation of knowing, even when it imposes the indetermination of style, object and method. Moving ideas from one field to another poses the risks of translation in different languages (Fassin, 2018), but also the rewards of discovering new spaces of thought.

Fraser’s mobilization of the notion of ‘symbiosis’ (2020), elaborated by Stengers (2018) is useful to familiarise the methodological approach in this article. It qualifies the relationship between researcher and the subjects of that research as one ‘empowered to evaluate the way [subjects] are being addressed, and to do so without trying to ‘capture’ the investigator in the process, making her into their spokesperson’. In fact, the article is based on 12 in-depth interviews (> 60 min) with longterm opium users, carried out within a larger project on the politics of illicit drugs, ‘addiction’ policy and state formation in modern Iran (Ghiabi, 2019). I carried out the interviews in the context of ethnographic field observation and, therefore, the style of the interaction was informal and based on long-term acquaintance with most of the interlocutors or with their close associates. The process was led by the personal and communal narratives, co-elaborated with the researcher who introduced information regarding the policy framework and the historical context drawn from top-down knowledge sources. The article proceeds through a thick description of the lifeworld of opium and opium policy in Iran, so that the theoretical and conceptual discussions are sustained and put to use in the empirical case, something that is often left limited space in scholarly work in ontologically-orientated research.

The data focused on the description and memories of the opium maintenance policy implemented between 1969 and 1979, which was recalled by the interviewees. It included details about registration on the programme, everyday practices of purchase and consumption, sharing and dealing, impressions and hearsay, encounters with illegality and the state, and the long-shadow of the revolutionary events that eradiated the opium maintenance policy by the end of 1978. The interviews were carried out between February 2017 and April 2019 and were gathered in the cities of Tehran and Arak and surrounding villages. Some of the interviewees recalled their period of residence in the city of Kerman and Mashhad, which have important connections to borderland dynamics with Northern and Southern Afghanistan, key motion trajectories of the global opium trade.

A review of Iran’s major newspapers and scientific reports on the subject complemented the interviews. The dearth of material on the opium maintenance policy is itself a sign of the unconventionality of this experiment, both in the time of its existence and in the aftermath oblivion as well as in the space it occurred. Far from being an exhaustive dataset, the interviews are useful in triangulating the accounts available in the scientific reports and the newspapers, both of which remain important sources in unearthing this forgotten policy experiment. All names are invented in order to maintain the anonymity of the participants, though their actions were mostly legal at the time of occurrence – but even what is legal is not necessarily acceptable by posterity.

Methodologically, the ontological journey of opium is co-constituted with (and not on) the participation of research interlocutors; not with the purpose of establishing new truths about what is right in drug policy, but with the aim of destabilizing unquestioned formats and emplacing new experiences outside the comfort zone of disciplinary-based scholarship. This endeavour bears in itself the seeds of a process of decolonization of drug studies which is now long overdue.

The ontological journeys of opium

Ontological journeys define the object of enquiry without exhausting its possibilities: in this case, they explore how opium and opium policies are in motion in social practices, regulatory spaces, bioethical ambiguities, and economic calculi across geopolitical borders. Opium be-comes multiple in its ontological journeys. As a substance it affects reality while it is made-up and transformed in historical circumstances Berridge, 1999; Mills, 2003, 2018; its social life (Appadurai, 1988; Duff, 2013) is matter of negotiation through policy and through practice. As in all journeys, opium’s journeys encountered institutions and agents that claim power over its mobility. Border agents, anti-narcotic officials, health regulators, diplomats, law makers (and breakers), poppy cultivators, smugglers, physicians, pharmacists, ethical entrepreneurs, patients and hedonists. These encounters do not only shape the way opium is understood, they also transform what opium is in the world.

For instance, during the 1970s, Afghan and Iranian traders transported opium across the Afghan-Iranian border, moving it from an (il)licit poppy field to the (il)legal consumer market. Following the journeys goes beyond what states ‘talk’ (Gootenberg, 2009): opium was ambiguous and entangled in both legality and illegality. Not only was opium openly traded and cultivated; if confiscated by state officials during its journey, opium would be repackaged and sold as third rate opium in a registered pharmacy, under Iran’s maintenance policy started in 1969. These journeys produced an overflow in policy processes that affected regulatory geographies, health interventions, governance apparatuses and people’s lives, akin to a journey that cut across fences, settles in places, and leaves traces as it moves beyond. Journeys are contaminating experiences; they change policy and the lifeworld of things.

Ontological shifts changed the place of opium through a policy journey driven by the clash in ideologies (counterpoising the state’s top-down Westernised modernization versus the revolutionaries’ antiWestern modernity), public ethics (opium as a health regulator versus opium as a decadent drug), and transnational political economies (opium as a smuggled commodity versus opium as a legal domestic asset). These ontological journeys moved opium across boundaries that were territorial, temporal, legal and ethical, crossing borderlands, into and out of the licenced pharmacy. The multiple – and not simply plural (Mol, 1999) – realities of opium’s journeys in time and space follow four main trajectories: the semantic journey as a pharmakon, i.e. ‘remedy’, ‘poison’, and ‘scapegoat’; the politico-economic journey as a commodity; the policy journey as part of an ontological intervention upon the reality of a substance; and the bioethical journey in negotiating claims over public ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in the conduct of life.

Semantic journeys across time and space

Over the 1970s the classificatory boundaries regarding opium in Iran shifted across the ambiguous, fluid line separating what is an illicit drug (hence: ‘evil’) and what is a medicine (hence: ‘good’). This is what the article refers to as (il)licit, a definition that links to the parallel ambiguity around definitions of (ab)use, as in the case of ‘addiction’ (Ghiabi, 2019; Keane, 2002).

Names are a way of being and the potentiality of being (thought) resides in the use of names (Agamben & Bonacci, 2019; Coccia, 2017). In its linguistic journey from ancient Greek, pharmakon has acquired the meaning of ‘remedy’, ‘poison’ and ‘scapegoat’ at the same time. The category of pharmakon deliberately broke through definitions. It embraced a semantic journey which cut across the drug/medicine/poison dichotomy (Gomart, 2002; Keane, 2011). This ambivalence is ontological because it qualifies the nature of the substance but also political, because pharmakon means ‘scapegoat’, the ritual of sacrifice for the polis, the community and its guarantors. Pharmakon stands simultaneously in what holds truth, because it is science, the ‘the best of all medicines: knowledge’ (Derrida, 1972) and in that which is false, because instead of healing, it poisons. Pharmakon is at the same time what is (il)legal and what is (il)licit. But does this ambiguity, which is semantic but also ontological (therefore semiotic), translate in contexts beyond the Western world, beyond the legacy of Greek civilisation?

If we take the case of the Islamic world, and within it, the case of Iran (sometimes mistakenly referred to as Persia in pre-19th century European texts) – one of the countries with the longest history of medical philosophy, pharmacopeia and drug economy (Ebrahimnejad, 2002; Ghiabi, 2018c; Ghiabi, 2019; Ghiabi et al., 2018; Matthee, 2005) – there are a number of connections elucidating the semantic journey of phar-makon. Although there is no translation for the ambiguity intrinsic in the Greek word pharmakon, there is a word/substance that captures the coexistence of otherwise incongruous meanings. That word is taryak, ‘opium’, the substance considered at times a medicine, a poison, a drug, and a scapegoat. Tariak (also spelt as tariaq, teriac or teriak) has made a journey from ancient Greece, to the Roman, Persian, Arab, Indian and Chinese civilisations north to England and across the British Empire in what has become the theriac, ‘anti-venom’ and ‘panacea’, the palliative to all evils known in the early modern period (Griffin, 2004) . It means ‘opium’, but it has had two additional connotations in Farsi (Persian). Taryak indicates ‘medicine’, the antidote to the snake’s venom, the pharmakon that cures all pains, spiritual, psychosomatic and physical. Taryak is also the emblematic ‘poison’, it is the substance used to murder enemies, to commit suicide, it is the drug par excellence, especially before the arrival of modern synthetic pharmaceuticals. Taryak as the pharmakon is the ontological movement – the journey – illuminating what is ‘good’ and what is ‘evil’, what is life and life-inducing, from what is mortal, what is a panacea of all problems from what is a scapegoat for policy/polity failures.

This semantic journey from Plato’s pharmakon to Iranians’ taryak exists in policy terms in the opium maintenance programme implemented by the Iranian government from 1969 to 1979. As a fundamental aspect of the enterprise of health, this policy opens up avenues for philosophical enquiry into medicine and its cultural, ethical and policy production. Medicine, as much as illicit drugs, are not simply constructed (Kleinman, 1973), but they exist in differing lifeworld made up of sociocultural and ethical manifestations that hold symbolic extant but also ontologies. They travel across geo-cultural and regulatory spaces, such as the Afghan-Iranian border, and result in different lifeworld of the dichotomy of medicine/drugs, (il)legal, and (il)licit.

What Barad says is undeniable when she writes ‘language has been granted too much power’ (2003); but it is time to add that certain languages have been granted more power than others. This semantic unilaterality squares the ontological multiplicity of substances, conforming them to a monolingual lifeworld. The ontological journeys of opium, instead, conduce to the ambivalence and fluidity in semantic discourses of opium, which is an essential step in recognising what Fraser (2020) refers to as the ‘performativity of language’ in ontopolitcally-orientated research.

The political economic journey across border(lands)

The semantic journey of opium is an ontological movement across time and space. This ontological journey encounters boundaries made of nation-states’ borders. This materiality is geopolitical, territorial and jurisdictional; it establishes exclusive spaces between states where gatekeepers and brokers become enablers of or impediments to the ontological journeys. An example of this ontological effects is evident in the Afghan-Iranian borders:

In 1955, Iran implemented opium prohibition. The ban responded to the politico-economics pressures originating in the Afghan poppy fields. Unlike Iran’s other neighbour Turkey, Afghanistan lacked a regulatory system guaranteeing legal opium cultivation for export. Throughout the Afghan territory, farmers and traders regarded opium as a licit commodity, part of an organised network of transnational trade. However, it was Iran’s 1955 opium ban that, in primis, had boosted opium’s value as a commodity in Afghanistan’s political economy. The opiate economy operated across the blurred line of the (il)legal, (il)licit economy across the two countries. Public officials, diplomats, large land-owners in Afghanistan and members of the Pahlavi court in Iran were involved in one way or the other in networks of opium provision (Bradford, 2019; Ghiabi, 2018b). Across the border, the Afghan government faltered in its pledge to control opium production, seeking instead the country’s inclusion in the list of legal producers. To appease international counterparts, Kabul initiated poppy eradication in 1958 in the NorthEast region of Badakhshan – far away from the Afghan-Iranian border, while refusing to enforce the policy across the other poppy producing regions, especially in the Western borderlands, such as Nim-roz, Farah and Herat which had a historical connection to the Iranian plateau.

Under geopolitical pressures originating in Tehran’s foreign policy strategy and mediated through the United States, the Afghan government emulated Iran’s 1955 prohibition. Its policy intervened by outlawing opium in a new regulatory space – the poppy fields of Badakhshan – while maintaining a (il)licit cultivation across the rest of the territories, where opium was a legitimated commodity. This coexisted with a transnational economic activity encompassing small and big opium agents in Afghanistan, moving across Iran where opium was traded, consumed and smuggled out westwards. Concomitant with stricter central regulations on opium production, the Afghan-Iranian border-world emerged as a transnational space of the heroin trade (Bradford, 2019; Ghiabi, 2018a; Gingeras, 2014).

The politico-economic journey of opium shows how changing policy regimes affect the flow of drugs across borders, increasing or decreasing the incentives, gradients and mark ups at borders and through borderlands. For example, capital flight became a main concern; large numbers of Iranians living in the North-East border region of Khorasan were travelling across the frontier to the Afghan city of Herat to sell gold coins (rials) to purchase opium to smuggle back into Iran (Bradford, 2019; Chouvy, 2010). Health hazards of uncontrolled heroin use, emerging with the expanding heroin trade, especially amongst Tehrani upper classes, gave major visibility to the question as a matter of politics. In 1970, the French government, worried about the scope of the ‘Marseille Connection’, commissioned a study of ‘Narcotic Trafficking originating in Afghanistan’ to the US mission to the Iranian Gendarmerie. The study showed that opium had become an important part of Afghanistan’s narcotics trade – and trade overall – with the networks having established a footing inside Iran (while prior to this, Iran’s main opium import was from Turkey). By then 90% of all smuggled opium in Iran originated in Afghanistan. A kilo of Afghan opium in Taybat (on the Afghan side of the border) costed $43.28; when it crossed the border, its price had risen to around $200 (Bradford, 2019). Thence, the amounts confiscated in Iran’s north-east and the high number of Afghan smugglers executed by Iranian authorities reflected the policy and ontological overflow across the Afghan-Iranian border.

Following these politico-economic journeys, the trade, evidently, became licit – yet illegal. It took place overtly and came at the expense of the Iranian state, but to the advantage of the many local gate keepers and brokers. Through networks involving local elites, ingenious (illicit) traders, national politicians and ambiguous regulatory spaces, opium’s ontological journeys transformed the political economy as it moved across the borderspaces. So policies framed within a national framework (i.e. Iran) have had complex spill over and diffusion effects on the other side of the border (and internationally). It also affected the materiality of opium, its ontological flow. As it moved through the borders, opium existed as licit, illegal, and legal, as trade commodity, smuggled good, and illicit drug. The journey across the (il)legal, (il)licit border of the opiate economy set the framework for Iran’s 1969 policy volteface, which reintroduced poppy cultivation across the country and established a nation-wide opium maintenance programme regulated through the institution of the pharmacy. This ontological journey interfered with the transformation of economic life and the lifeworld of borderlands in a transnational dimension. Opium be-came a pharmakon. It returned to its licit place within the pharmacopeia, while maintaining an ambiguous status within its political economy.

The policy journey across the public

The decision to reintroduce poppy cultivation and initiate opium maintenance strangely overlapped with the US election of Richard Nixon to the White House. Soon after his election, Nixon pledged to a policy that later in 1971 would be known as the ‘war on drugs’. The US and Pahlavi Iran were then staunch geopolitical allies, American antinarcotic officials had trained and supported their Iranian counterparts since the Shah’s reinsertion to the throne in 1953, and Iran had been a strategic partner in stopping the flow of Afghan drugs – especially heroin and, to a lesser degree, cannabis – towards Europe, where, via the French Connection, they reached North America (Ghiabi, 2018c; Marchant, 2012; Weimer, 2019).

Over the preceding six decades, the Iranian state had implemented – at times stringently, at others haphazardly – different drugs policy models. It had progressively moved from a laissez faire approach to a prohibitionist model (Ghiabi, 2019). The 1969 policy built upon this historical policy experience and on its differing ontological lifeworld. The policy journey to opium maintenance occurred against the backdrop of successive historical attempts at governing drugs through the ontology of pharmakon as a drug/poison/scapegoat.

In empirical terms, four main arguments could be mobilised to follow the policy journey from prohibition to maintenance of opium:

• ¨Opium had to become a legal, regulated commodity because neighbouring countries were unwilling or incapable of collaborating in tackling its (il)licit trade. The policy change had to fill the lacunae of narco-diplomacy within the frame of drugs control. The law, in Article 1, explicitly puts it: ‘Opium cultivation shall continue for as long as neighbouring countries cultivate and produce opium’ (Consultative Assembly 1969b [1347]).
• ¨By trial and experimentation over six decades, the state recognised that only through direct, material – we could say ‘ontological’ – intervention it was possible to produce effective policy on opium. The maintenance policy put aside the rhetorical pledge to eradicate opium from Iranian society and, hence, it abandoned the policy-based evidence that had distinguished the 1955 failed prohibition policy. The new policy sought to experiment on the potential of comprehensive regulation of opium in a cultural environment where opium had been an ordinary, multi-faceted commodity.
• ¨By controlling opium production and consumption, the government addressed the expanding heroin trafficking and consumption, and limiting capital flight while bolstering public health measures. (By 1969, national statistics referred to ca. 10,000 heroin users, mostly living in the capital Tehran). Again, the text of the law makes reference to the centrality of treatment of ‘addiction’ via the physicians’ active role in the administration of opiates (Consultative Assembly 1969b [1347]).
• ¨Maintenance as a policy relocated opium to its cultural, social, and historical lifeworld as it had been for over several centuries. The move also represented the chance to formulate an indigenous drug policy in opposition to the homogenising power of Westernisation and modernisation.

The different arguments agreed on opium’s ontological fluidity as a pharmakon/jaryak across time and space. Opium’s ontological journeys affected the making of the policy which in turn influenced the ontology of opium.

Within this new framework, farmers could legally cultivate the opium poppy under a government-mandate licence. All the country’s opium would be collected and stored in state-owned warehouses where local officials would perform quality control under the mandate of the Opium Transaction Agency (Sazman-e mo’melat-e tariyak). From the warehouse, the Agency’s officials would affix the state stamps according to the quality of the opium, categorising it as first, second rate and third rate. It would be then redistributed to pharmacies ( darukhaneh) (Consultative Assembly 1969b [1347]), and consumed for pain management and, in practice, for pleasure (Amirabadi, 2018; Hezavei, 2017). A glimpse at the 1969 policy equips us with a formidable example of ‘ontological intervention’ (Lancaster & Rhodes, 2020):

Physicians could prescribe opium in two different formats. The first and simplest route concerned patients who were opium users, were more than sixty years of age and were judged too old to undergo detoxification and/or ‘addiction’ rehabilitation. The physicians could prescribe a discretionary amount of opium to their patients, usually between 1 to 20 g of opium per day (Kheyrabadi, 2019; McLaughlin & Quinn, 1973), but there are instances of higher doses (Amirabadi, 2018 Maleki, 2018; Mohajerani, 2017). The patient would have a ‘coupon’, a sui generis ID card with his/her picture and the prescribed amount. The second category related to those below the age of sixty. For this category, physicians could prescribe opium if the patient manifested symptoms related to chronic pain, fatigue, rheumatism and other physical impairments, including ‘addiction’ (Consultative Assembly 1969b [1347]). All patients had to register with their local branch of the Opium Transaction Agency and refer to a local pharmacy recognised by the Ministry of Health. The policy instituted that 80% of the revenues generated from the sale of opium to the public would automatically be transferred to the Ministry of Health’s Addiction Treatment and Rehabilitation programme; the remaining 20% would instead finance the Ministry of Land and Rural Cooperatives’ rural development plans in marginal and impoverished communities (Consultative Assembly 1969b [1347], Consultative Assembly 1969c, a).

Instead, the trade of opium was the exclusive monopoly of the state. The Opium Transaction Agency purchased the entire harvest on the ‘very day of the incision of the poppy heads by the officials of the Ministry of Rural Affairs and immediately transferred [the opium sap] to Government stores’, with a price which was 12-times that of the price of opium on the international market of licit opium, i.e. 100$ per kg with a water content of 30–36% (McLaughlin & Quinn, 1973; Moharreri, 1976). Domestic production of opium had to provide a supply for Iran’s market and to the emerging pharmaceutical demand for opiates (Consultative Assembly 1969b [1347]). Policymakers were adamant in reassuring international narcotics controllers that no Iranian opium would flow beyond its borders (McLaughlin & Quinn, 1973). As a proof of their argument, the 1969 policy enforced heavy sanctions against all transgressors of the drug laws, particularly those trafficking or smuggling opiates out of Afghanistan and into Turkey (Ghiabi, 2018c). The law was draconian in all its facets: rather than a civilian or penal court, the military court (dadgah-e nezami) judged drug offenders, a protocol that left little leeway for mitigating circumstances such as age, gender and social and economic status. Amongst the provision, the courts also disposed of the power to sanction the death penalty, a measure that occurred with a certain regularity. The Associated press reported on December 29, 1969 – a few months into the new regulatory regime – that ‘Kazem Manuchehri, 27, was executed by a firing squad...for peddling 10 g of heroin...Ten persons were executed on similar charges last week and at least 50 more are facing trial’ (Journal of the American Medical Association 1970). The coexistence of a medicalised opium maintenance programme with a militaristic approach had the objective of appeasing the Western, particularly American, allies as to where Iran stood on international narco-trafficking. As this instance illuminates, opium moved to a new ontological potential where a model of ‘more-than-harm reduction’ (Dennis, Rhodes & Harris, 2020) coexisted with the public force of the state over the limits of the ontological journeys.

The ontology of opium changed through the journey of opium, its motion through the many lifeworlds. Not all those who consumed opium did effectively register in the maintenance programme. Government officials and medical professionals could hardly set up a supply system across the vast and scattered human settlements of the Iranian plateau – seven time the size of the UK but with half the population in the 1970s. The supervisory agency estimated that the programme covered only half of the target population of opiate users (Moharreri, 1976). The lack of registered physicians and of pharmacies impeded the administration of opium beyond the major provincial capitals located at the heart of the country. The Opium Transaction Agency compensated for this void in state projection by drafting a specific plan for rural areas. It gave local Health Corps the authority to administer opium through an ad hoc informal registration system (McLaughlin & Quinn, 1973). A volunteer body of health workers created under the 1963 ‘White Revolution’ – a top-down plan promoted by the Pahlavi monarchy – the Corps operated where the state institutions did not have a regular presence; hence they were usually dispatched to distant rural communities in borderlands, east and west (Popp, 2008; Sabahi, 2001).

Confiscated opium coming across the border was also sold over the pharmacy’s counter, but it was a third-rate product compared to the Iranian produce (McLaughlin & Quinn, 1973). The programme was so successful that the opium distributed in pharmacies became generally known as tariyak-e senaturi, the senator’s (or senatorial) opium. It was the senators, after all, who had approved the law regulating and legalising medical opium and it was the senators who granted the high quality of the product. This was real medicine, one said, the rest, illegal stuff, just the usual drug (Salehi, 2019). Here, opium be-comes a different substance, with different values and cultural forms, through the ontological journeys of policy and politico-economics in space (across borderlands) and time (in the evolution of cultural practice).

The bio-ethical journey of opium

The tensions over the multiple ontologies of opium exist also in the realm of ethics. An opium maintenance programme, on a large scale, engenders an alternative ethics of life, not simply a new policy setting. Other governments across the world had experimented with opiates maintenance programmes. This policy model was generally known as the ‘British model’. Its vision focused on guaranteeing medical professionals the power to exercise their right to prescribe opiates for patients who had developed a drug habit, such as morphine or heroin ‘addiction’ (Anderson & Berridge, 2000; Berridge, 1999; Richert, 2017). Implemented since the early 1900s, the UK government narrowed down the policy scope in response to the changing class dynamics of heroin consumption in the 1960s, limiting the physicians’ right to prescribe opiates (Mold, 2004; Seddon, 2020). Archival material seems to suggest that the ‘British model’ was not the source of inspiration for Iran’s maintenance policy; rather the Iranian policy acted as an ontological journey in the lifeworld of ethics. It was substantially different, in quantitative and qualitative scope and scale, and responded to a multidimensional challenge in economic, health and cultural policy. Rather than defining the scope of opiates prescription and the physicians’ duty and rights, the Iranian programme provided a legitimate framework for opium to be part of the nation’s agricultural, economic, social, and health policy. It enshrined a new ontological status – in the making, in fieri – for opium and its ethics.

Iran’s programme was holistic and that is what differentiates it from other opiate maintenance programmes implemented in the 20th century. To get a measure of the scale of the Iranian 1969 policy, it is useful to consider that the UK heroin prescription policy targeted between a few hundred to a couple of thousand people in the whole of Great Britain (Mold, 2004). Instead, the 1969 policy renegotiated the place of opium within the pharmacological grammar and the politicoeconomics of opiates in Iran. Between 1969 and 1979 – the period when it was the law of the land –, there was a steady increase in the number of registered people, with numbers increasing 75% up to 200,000 registered users, half of whom where below fifty. Not only did the number of registered users increased; also the amount of distributed opium to public agents (i.e. pharmacies) went up by about 98%, with the average prescription dose seeing a rise of 81% (Central Treaty Organization 1972; McLaughlin & Quinn, 1973; Moharreri, 1976, 1978). Almost anyone wishing to acquire opium could do so through the mediation of a physician or a pharmacist; or, as in the case of borderlands, through the now licit illegal market. The ontological journeys of opium reached far in time and space.

But medical opium was not open to everyone and that is why the number of registered opium users never officially exceeded 200,000. The 1969 law included measures that indicated that ‘all those employed by public institutions must give up their opium habit or risk being expelled from their post, within a period of four months, and if recovery does not occur, they should be fired after a period of 12 months’ (Consultative Assembly 1969 [1347]). Similarly, ‘workers and employees in physical, educational, recreational centres as well as traders registered at trading houses and guilds could see their membership revoked if found with a opium habit’ (Consultative Assembly 1969 [1347]). The objective of these measures was to prevent the opening of public smoking houses (shirehkesh khaneh), as they had existed in the first half of the century (Ghiabi, 2018c; Ghiabi, 2019). The opium habit – as a phar-makon – remained confined to the private sphere, at home, in gardens and in informal clubs (Dorudi, 2018; Hezavei, 2017; Maleki, 2018). It is not a surprise that the largest share of opium users did not register on the maintenance programme. This is demonstrated by studies on the socio-economic composition of the programme’s registered users. Around 60–70% of them belonged to working class groups, with women constituting 12–15% (Agahi & Spencer, 1981; Mehryar & Mohar-reri, 1978; Moharreri, 1976). Wealthier opium users, who maintained their habit in private, accessed the substance through different paths. In the interviews carried out with elderly opium users who had experience of the maintenance policy, most of them confirmed that, to obtain high quality opium under the ‘coupon’ system, they would ask their subaltern employees – house workers, gardeners, porters, peons, etc. – to register on the medical opium programme, tipping them either with the premium opium or in cash (Amirabadi, 2018; Maleki, 2018; Salehi, 2019). In fewer cases, given that most women in the upper-class families were unemployed, the head of the household would ask female members to register so to avoid public embarrassment and/or prosecution, opium being unlawful for members of guilds and public employees (Amirabadi, 2018). In the minority of cases, upper class opium users would revert to illegal dealers or to the regulated legal market to obtain a supply of opium (Hezavei, 2017). Within this framework, there was a downstream flow of opium in the possession of registered users who had quantities far in excess of their daily consumption, reaching up to 20 g per day. Opium moved in Iranian society through ontological journeys that made it multiple and ambivalent, legal and illegal, illicit and licit. Class and power relations altered the ethical lifeworld of opium.

This fluid ontology of opium was at odds with the international regulatory regime extant during the 1970s and still active today. Iran’s maintenance policy received criticism from within and without the country. The president of the International Board of Narcotics Control (INCB) expressed ‘doubts before the Commission as to the wisdom of Iran resuming opium production as a counter-measure to the illicit supplies of opium which were coming into the country’ (Bulletin of Narcotics 1970). Criticisms took a more direct fashion in the occurrence of the International Public Health Conference of the Central Treaty Organisation in 1972, in Ramsar (Iran). The Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO, aka ‘ Baghdad Pact’) was a military alliance of pro-Western countries in West and South Asia, set up by the US and UK amidst the regional Cold War struggle. The conference was organised by Dr Sidney Cohen, who acted as the US coordinator for the event, and was a prominent drug researcher, including in the field of the therapeutic use of LSD and marijuana. Criticism however did not move beyond the frame of opium being ‘an evil’ or as Iran’s programme being against the modernising momentum that Iran had gone through in the preceding decade (Central Treaty Organization 1972). The old modalities of policy-based evidence -i.e. drug-free world evidence – were dominant. Yet, some of the Iranian researchers presenting at the conference, especially those who had looked at social and cultural dimensions of medicine, came up with arguments based on the ‘ontology’ of opium, within the 1969 maintenance policy. The lines of argument ran as follows:

• ¨‘The popular concept of smoking opium was more or less like having a pint of beer, and one only considered as an addict one who always took the drug. Once a person was not a slave of the drug then he became an ordinary citizen who was entitled to have opium if he wanted to enjoy himself. His brothers could have their whisky and vodka in Western society’ (Central Treaty Organization 1972).
• ¨‘Because of its historical roots in the medical beliefs and traditions of Iranian people, opium addiction has so far remained unaffected by the kind of criminal and antisocial subculture that is usually associated with drug addiction.Moreover, in the majority of cases, use of opium starts within a normal social setting as a means of medication or pain relief and is infrequently associated with severe personality disturbances. Thus, the majority of Iranian opium addicts are socially responsible individuals with stable employment and family records’ (Central Treaty Organization 1972).
• ¨Others argued that society’s judgement ‘is different’ as in Iran the ‘addict’ is not considered an anti-social person, but rather a super-social person. He is a more deserving of respect that the user of alcohol (Central Treaty Organization 1972). The supersociality of opium consumers is a topoi that also recurred in the interviews (Amirabadi, 2018; Aqilabadi, 2019; Hezavei, 2017; Kheyrabadi, 2019; Mohajerani, 2017). This shows how the ethical journey of opium and the ‘addict’ gave way not necessarily to negative or victimised existences, but rather with forms-of-life with agency and opium as part of a life practice.

While opium resettled in the cultural formulations of Iranian modernity, its place also remained inherently ambiguous in clinical praxis as well as in bioethical and political terms. Physicians working in ‘addiction recovery centres’ would use methadone together with opium as a treatment substitute in the process of detoxification (Central Treaty Organization 1972). Meanwhile, the Iranian pharmaceutical industry supported by the Ministry of Health developed the ‘opium pill’, a local pharmacological remedy containing 80 mg of opium extract and 8 mg of Largactil (Chlorpromazine), an anti-psychotic drug produced since the 1950s, to counter the clinical shortcomings of methadone treatment, the latter deemed largely unsuccessful in the practice by Iranian physicians. The opium pill instead gave comparatively modestly positive results. It also embodied the encounter of the drug in its traditional form with modern medicine, moving further the ontological journey of opium.

Through the ontological journeys what emerges is that there is not a single opium or a unique lifeworld of ‘addiction’ to opiates. Drug consumption becomes locally contingent, but also embedded in a fluid ethics that is part and parcel of the processes of change and renewal of policy, culture and economics.

Conclusions. Ontological policies

What do the ontological journeys of opium have to say about contemporary drugs policy? What happens when drug policy becomes a matter of ontology? How does this forgotten policy experiment in the ‘periphery’ speak to the global debate on drugs, which hitherto have been neglectful of the global South?

The opium maintenance policy displaces opium from the binary status it had acquired since the outset of West-centric modernity. Its jurisdictional – ‘il/legal’ –, economic – ‘il/licit’ –, ethical – ‘good/evil’ –, and cultural – ‘medicine/drug’-terms are transformed through a policy that had profound effect on the political ontology of the substance. The opium maintenance policy is a response to the question of how to manage opium in society; but it does so by asking a question so often left out of the mind frame of policymakers – yesterday as much as today – about what is opium. This is a matter of political ontology for it seeks a radical transformation of the lifeworld of things (in our case, opium or drugs) in their encounter with the forms of human organisation, the polis of politics, of community. In this process, a political ontology of drugs opens potentialities for forms of life – human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic – that are in be-coming, in movement, in journeys with no end point and, therefore, always potential and in fieri. The maintenance of opium, though incomplete, is therefore an ontological policy.

In the specific case study proposed here, the ontological journey is a movement of nuance. The maintenance policy reassessed opium’s place, not through Western biomedical knowledge or through the diktats of anti-narcotic policymaking, but through an ontological intervention on the substance of opium. Uncovering this forgotten policy experiment makes it possible to formulate a counterargument to the teleological, reductionist equations on policy. That is how the Iranian experiment between 1969 and 1979 went against the grain of modernisation theorists for whom every nation, no matter where or in what circumstances, should or could become like the United States. All it took was to become the American model. This ontology is captured aptly in Walt Ros-tow’s citation of Witman’s Divine Ship where ‘all peoples of the globe sail together, sail the same voyage, are bound to the same destination’ (Engerman & Unger, 2009; Rostow, 1960; Whitman, 2000). Instead the ship of policy sails many journeys, each intimate with the realities it lives in. The Iranian example occurred through the appropriation and re-use of opium as a medical device in specific cultural environments of health, which were concomitant to the reassertion of state formation priorities in locating opium in the global political economy. Justification of the maintenance policy occurred both on modernising terms, for instance by referring to the use of ante tempore harm reduction logics when confronted with the rise in heroin use following the 1955 prohibition of opium; and through the reformulation of traditional cultural practices, again in modern forms, as demonstrated by the return to the study of Iranian Islamic physician and philosopher al-Razi (Razhes, 850–923 CE) and Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980–1037 CE) and their clinical studies of opium and its therapeutics. But it was not apothecaries and folk physicians educated in Galenic humoralism and traditional medicine that had the control over opium prescription. It was the state through the Opium Transaction Agency at the political economic level; and the pharmacy and the medical profession at the health policy level that oversaw the administration of opium as the pharmakon, or the taryak.

This experiment, though short-lived – and put to an end by another ontological event on the being of power and the state: the Iranian Revolution of 1979 – shows that advancement in drug policy may not necessarily come from Western models of governance and not necessarily through linear lines of evolution. The international drug control regime being a West-centric, Euromerican governance machine, innovation and policy transformation are more likely to occur on the margins of the policy world and governance system of drugs. The tension between local experiments and global frameworks could be challenged through the remaking of traditions, such as the re-appropriation of forms of drug governance that are sensitive to the political ontologies of drugs. This means acknowledging of the multiplicity of drugs lifeworld: social practices, regional political-economic structures, and ambiguous ethical standings, all conceived in their ontological journeys. Seen through this frame, opium’s place in the world confutes state talk and state imagination for it traces, not static images, but complex journeys that affect its ontologies on multiple levels: semantic; political and economic; and bioethical.

What implications can we draw for global drug policy and for drugs policy in the global South and North?

The first implication is to accept that policy on drugs falls at the intersect of macro- and micro-political ontologies. To formulate innovative and experimental policies, there are few blueprints to be followed; avoiding ontological questions on the nature and lifeworld of drugs is not a solution. Rather policy should emerge from careful assessment of local and global conditions, from cultural, societal, and economic elements concerning health, livelihood and lifeworld. This implies that policy experimentation could (or perhaps should?) run against the grain of the global consensus on drug regulation, which in itself is the expression of particularistic drives historically and strategically borne out of West-centric, Euromerican imperial interests (McCoy, 2003; Mills, 2003; Trocki, 1999) and of closed and narrow ontologies (though not referred to as such) of drugs. And as research on drugs and policy has political implications, moving the analytical gaze to new spaces and new times bears the potential of new (decentralising) ontologies.

Moving beyond Iran’s frontiers, equivalent policy could emerge in Colombia with coca and cocaleros; in Myanmar with opium and its pharmaceutical repurposing; and in Afghanistan, with opiates and poppy cultivation. They could crop up in the African continent where the ontological journeys of cannabis resemble those of opium in the Iranian case: medicine, ritual, inebriant, all imbued in historical (colonial) and political realities (Waetjen, 2019). Alternative models of drug policy could emerge via political bargaining and intrasocietal negotiations amidst long-term conflicts, but only if one abandons state imagination and state talk in favour of an approach attentive to the ontological journeys. It is perhaps the time to ask why are we forcing an international framework (read, a West-centric, Euromerican ontology) over something that is embedded in local ontologies. But the question is naïve as its response is nakedly visible in the global power relations and modes of production – including knowledge production – that have made up the contemporary. As ontologies leave room for potentialities, they open ways where the logics of positive science is unable to move. Attempts at purging a specific realities of opium, from cure to poison to scapegoat, enforce an ontological violence upon what would otherwise exist in the ambiguity of being, of care, of, community, of life and lifeworld, of pharmakon, of taryak.