Nine convicted drug traffickers have been recently hanged in Iran, according to several middle eastern news sources all citing the Islamic Republic News Agency.

Details on the matter were sparse, but it appeared that three drug traffickers were hanged at a prison in the northwest Iranian province of Ardabil on charges of buying and transporting heroin and opium. Iran is located more or less dead center on a major opium smuggling route between Afghanistan and Europe which has led to sky-high rates of opiate addiction in the area.

The other six convicted traffickers were executed separately for trafficking charges related to methamphetamine, heroin and cannabis though it was unclear if all six were charged for all three substances. 

Iran has some of the harshest penalties in the world for drug dealing and executions. A Reuters article from July of this year reported that Iran had executed 20 drug traffickers in one day. Figures released in June by Amnesty International, a United Kingdom-based human rights advocacy group, reported that Iran had executed 173 people for drug-related offenses and 282 people total in the first half of 2023 after what they described as “systematically unfair trials.”

“The shameless rate at which the authorities are carrying out drug-related executions, in violation of international law, exposes their lack of humanity and flagrant disregard for the right to life. The international community must ensure that cooperation in anti-drug trafficking initiatives do not contribute, directly or indirectly, to the arbitrary deprivation of life and other human rights violations in Iran,” said Diana Eltahawy, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa.

The same report from Amnesty International said that around 20 percent of executions in Iran targeted a community known as the Baluch or Baloch people, a poor pastoral Muslim ethnic group living chiefly in coastal Pakistan and Northwest Iran. Amnesty International said that the death penalty trials often target the poorest of Iranians who are unaware of their rights or of how to properly fight for their own defense. 

“The judges in Revolutionary Courts will ask if the drugs are yours and it makes no difference if you say yes or no. The judge at my trial told me to be quiet when I said the drugs were not mine. He said my sentence was death and ordered me to sign a document accepting it. He didn’t even allow my lawyer to speak in my defense,” an Iranian Death Row inmate said to Amnesty International.

Another relative of a death row inmate told Amnesty International that the prisoner’s court appointed lawyer basically extorted them for a large sum of money and then vanished entirely. 

“She never saw her court-appointed lawyer. He gave the family false promises that he would have her death sentence overturned if they paid him an extortionate amount of money,” the relative of a Death Row inmate said.” They sold everything they had to pay him, even their sheep. Once he took their money, he disappeared and left the family with a lot of debt.”

Another relative of someone executed in Iran, a teenager, told Amnesty International he was now faced with the choice of making money to support his family or paying his school registration. 

“I should be worried about my exams like other children, not going to work. My wages do not cover my family’s necessities because of all the loans we have. I don’t even have the money to cover my school registration for next year. If my father hadn’t been executed, I would be thinking about my future right now, not thinking of how to make money for my family,” the teenager said. 

A 2022 Amnesty International report said that Iran had the second highest rates of executions in the world, surpassed only by China. The same report said the rate of execution in Iran increased by 83 percent from 2021 to 2022 largely due to an increase in murder and drug trafficking convictions. 

“States and intergovernmental bodies must condemn the Iranian authorities, in the strongest terms, for these arbitrary executions, call for an official moratorium on all executions, send representatives to visit prisoners sentenced to death, and seek attendance at trials involving capital crimes. Given the crisis of impunity for mass arbitrary executions, they must also urgently pursue meaningful pathways for accountability,” Eltahawy said. 

In early 2023 Amnesty International reported five people were executed for engaging in protests, a man was executed for adultery due to having engaged in a consensual sexual relationship with a married woman, and two social media users were executed for “apostasy,” meaning the abandonment or renunciation of religious beliefs, and “insulting the Prophet of Islam.”

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The Central Intelligence Agency recently said in a podcast episode that a CIA-backed coup in Iran during the 1950’s was “undemocratic,” a first for the agency. 

According to an article by the Associated Press, the 1953 Iranian military coup that removed Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh from power gave control of Iran to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who served until his own overthrow in the 1979 Iranian Revolution. 

During the Iranian Revolution, the U.S. embassy in Iran was  seized by a group of Iranian students who took American citizens and others hostage for 444 days in a row. The CIA sent agents in to recover six American diplomats in one of the agency’s most famous missions which served as inspiration for the movie Argo. 

The CIA discussed these events and the 1953 coup in a recent episode of the CIA podcast “The Langley Files,” named after Langley Virginia where CIA headquarters is located. The podcast was started in late 2022 to publicly dispel some of the more negative rumors circulating about the nation’s most secretive arm of government (a substantial percentage of which do involve military coups, to be perfectly fair).

CIA historian and Langley Files host Walter Trosin said on the episode that much of the agency’s activities were focused on “bolstering” democratically elected governments but that this particular action did not meet that criteria. 

“We should acknowledge, though, that this is, therefore, a really significant exception to that rule,” Trosin said. 

“This is one of the exceptions to that,” said CIA historian Brett Geary in response. 

The CIA gave a statement to the AP after the episode was released, essentially saying that if they were going to tell the story of the CIA’s 1979 extraction mission, it would only be right under the context of all the events that led to that day. 

“CIA’s leadership is committed to being as open with the public as possible,” the agency said in a statement to the AP. “The agency’s podcast is part of that effort — and we knew that if we wanted to tell this incredible story, it was important to be transparent about the historical context surrounding these events, and CIA’s role in it.”

The CIA has kept most of if not all information about the coup classified for the last 70 years. But despite these recent developments and despite other members of government publicly offering similar sentiments in the past, almost all the CIA’s information about the coup remains classified to this day. The CIA actually admitted at one point that most of the files related to the 1953 coup were likely destroyed in the 1960’s, according to the AP.

“It’s wrong to suggest that the coup operation itself has been fully declassified. Far from it,” said Malcolm Byrne of the National Security Archive. “Important parts of the record are still being withheld, which only contributes to public confusion and encourages myth-making about the U.S. role long after the fact.”

Iran dismissed the steps taken by the CIA to shed some light on the situation, calling it “the inception of relentless American meddling in Iran’s internal affairs” in a statement to the AP.

“The U.S. admission never translated into compensatory action or a genuine commitment to refrain from future interference, nor did it change its subversive policy towards the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Iran’s mission to the United Nations said.

These developments come at a time where tensions between the United States and Iran are high, even by historical comparison, due to U.S. pressure on Iran to halt progress on its nuclear program. President Biden also just reached a deal with Qatar to prevent Iran from accessing $6 billon in assets that were unfrozen as part of a prisoner swap deal in response to Iran’s longtime support of Hamas, a militant group which led a bloody and unprecedented assault on Israel over the weekend that killed hundreds of civilians. 

Another first for the agency came on the same podcast episode – a previously unnamed CIA operative who took part in the 1979 extraction had his identity revealed as  agency linguist and exfiltration specialist Ed Johnson, who was previously only known as “Julio.”

Johnson recounted his experience on the mission to the hosts of the podcast, saying it was especially challenging because the diplomats they had to rescue were not spies and had no formal training for anything resembling the situation they found themselves in. 

“Working with the six — these are rookies,” Johnson recounts in an interview aired by the podcast. “They were people who were not trained to lie to authorities. They weren’t trained to be clandestine, elusive.”

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Sharia law in the Taliban-dominated country of Afghanistan now bans weed cultivation along a long list of other basic freedoms.

The Express-Tribune reports that Taliban supreme leader Mawlavi Hibatullah Akhundzada issued a decree in Kabul, Afghanistan that the cultivation of cannabis is prohibited across the country. The decree was reported on March 19. When someone is caught growing cannabis, the operation will be destroyed and violators punished according to Sharia law.

“Cultivation in the whole country is completely banned and if anyone grows them, the plantation will be destroyed. The courts have also been ordered to punish the violators as per Sharia laws,” stated Akhundzada.

Who is Akhundzada? CBS News reported on Feb. 17, 2023 that Akhundzada has essentially taken Afghanistan back to the “Stone Age,” with one of the most draconian takes on Sharia law. Within two years, he took women out of schools in the country, again. Even the Taliban’s acting Minister of Interior Sirajuddin Haqqani criticized Akhundzada’s thirst for power.

What exactly are punishments under Sharia law? The “crimes” of apostasy, revolt, adultery, slander, and alcohol carry penalties that include the amputation of hands and feet, flogging, and/or death. This also includes punishments for the uncovered bodies and hair of women.

Cannabis (and opium) trade is believed to have “fueled militancy” in Afghanistan before the Taliban’s rise to power in 2021. After Sept. 11, 2001 insurgents in Afghanistan never gave up, for over 20 years.

On April, 14, 2021, President Joe Biden announced that remaining troops in Afghanistan would be withdrawn by Sept. 11, 2021, 20 years after 9-11. Four presidents subsequently failed to dissolve the Taliban. But after announcing the withdrawal, the Taliban military immediately sprung into action and took the capital, Kabul, on Aug. 15, 2021, causing the government to collapse. The Taliban announced control about a month later.

Cannabis in Afghanistan

Cannabis cultivation is by no means a limited underground phenomenon in Afghanistan.

For background, cannabis remains one of the most produced crops by farmers across the country. Afghanistan “is the second country most frequently reported as the origin of seized cannabis resin worldwide, accounting for 18 percent of all reports on the main ‘country of origin’ in the period 2015–2019,” the UN Office of Drugs and Crime (UNDOC) reported in 2021. Only Morocco reports more seizures of cannabis resin.

Between 10,000 and 24,000 hectares of cannabis were grown every year in Afghanistan, with major operations in 17 out 34 provinces the UNODC reported in 2010.

It’s kind of a double standard if you look at what the Taliban has done in the past. Before the Taliban took over power once again in 2021, militants reportedly “siphoned off millions of dollars” from pot farmers and the smugglers who ship cannabis.

Creating more hypocrisy, the Taliban claimed to have partnered with a medical cannabis company in 2021.

Taliban Press Director Qari Saeed Khosty claimed that a contract had been signed between the government and a cannabis firm called Cpharm to set up a $450 million cannabis processing centre in Afghanistan, and further that the facility would be “up and running within days.” The news ran globally, picked up by outlets including the Times of London.

This also coincided with a report on Afghanistan’s Pajhwok Afghan News Service that representatives of the company met with counter-narcotic officials at the Ministry of the Interior to discuss the production of medicines and creams. 

Cpharm Australia, the first company named in the press as being involved in the deal, subsequently rebuked the claim, according to Reuters. 

For the time being, cannabis cultivation is banned for everyone else in the country.

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