The cultural turn in understanding 'addiction'.

In this essay we want to foreground a question: what happens to 'addiction' when we take seriously cultural scripts informing its trajectories? Can this bring us to unthink addiction as problematic notion and move it onto new paradigms that fit better the now acknowledged fluidity and pluralistic episteme of 'addiction' and more broadly of chronic life conditions? Indeed, 'addiction' has become a pivotal concept in the contemporary world. A powerful diagnostic framework in interpreting human behaviour, for some 'addiction' has become the 'new normal' with chronic relations with different things such as food, sex, gambling, and mind-altering substances touching upon the lifestyle of a majority of individuals, making everyone 'addicts in practice'. Perhaps this has something to do with the constituent force that 'habit' - as in 'addiction' - has in defining our present and future. Though 'addiction' goes beyond the question of mind-altering drugs, the politics of 'addiction' is intimately tied to substances such as opioids and opiates, cocaine, cannabis, and psychedelics that have been the object of durable systemic political control and security repression. Contextually the line between licit/illicit substances is softening and blurring, the 'dual' purpose that drugs serve is now recognised in scientific and popular analysis moving the question of 'addiction' beyond the medicine/drug dichotomy. Yet, culture is generally absent in understanding 'addiction.' When it is referred to, this happens in diminutive terms limited to Anglo-American modern culture. Culture matters and it matters with different weights and measures as it moves across the world. There are cultural environments of health informed by practices and epistemologies of well-being that have evolved in lines opposites from or only intersecting with the Anglo-American, and generally Western, world. Exploring these spaces and cultural scripts enables our scholarship on drugs and 'addiction' to move the barycentre of discussion towards novel considerations around the historical trajectories and potential futures of our diagnostic terms and policy interventions.

Social work post-disaster response in Iran: A case study of the 2019 mass flooding in Poldokhtar, Lorestan.

Flash-flooding affected Iran in March 2019 causing the displacement of thousands of people. Social workers established a Child Friendly Space (CFS) and applied comprehensive case management to provide psychosocial support for people who were affected by flooding (PWAF) (n = 565) in a community in Poldokhtar, covering a period of 3 months. Outreach services, involving community-volunteers, providing counseling, establishing CFS, training PWAF for reducing violence, and preventing child abuse were essential social work post-disaster interventions to support vulnerable populations. The article reflects upon the often-neglected role of social workers in post-disaster settings, and brings new material for discussion from the unexplored field of Iranian social workers.

Critique of everyday narco-capitalism.

Capitalism is not only an economic mode of production; it is also a form of life. This also applies to a historical type of capitalism, which is the capitalism founded on (illicit) drugs - in other words: narco-capitalism. The article discusses how capitalism alters life at the nexus of drug production, trade and consumption through a study of drug heartlands in Colombia, Afghanistan and Myanmar. What forms of life emerge under narco-capitalism? And how do people seek change and express agency in the exploitative conditions governed by narco-capital? To do so, the article proceeds through the following sections: first, it elucidates its definition of the 'everyday' as a conceptual and methodological scheme to understand capitalist forms of life. Then it uses material collected from people's everyday encounter with narco-capitalism in Afghanistan, Myanmar and Colombia to discuss mystification, predation and alienation. The article explores how capitalism produces forms of life that make use of drugs and narco-capital to dispossess and alienate collectivities. Finally, the article argues that to move beyond this alienating condition, drug wars and/or development are not a solution, because drugs are not the problem. Instead, it is people's organisation and world-building in dialectical mode to capitalist forms of life that can transform everyday life beyond predation and alienation.

The Pluriverse of Intoxication: Words, Lives, Worlds in Islamicate History.

This article establishes a conceptual framework for decolonial drug histories and, at the same time, moves beyond decolonization. It brings back the radical alterity of historical figures of intoxication in the Islamicate world and introduces them as paradigms with potential to go beyond decolonization. This approach refers to the urgency of not comfortably relying on decolonial critique as moral indignation toward the past but rather showing that drug histories subsume radically different epistemologies and ontologies from those enunciated by coloniality/modernity. The article studies the Islamicate world through a decolonized nomenclature based on everyday historical approaches, beyond the myths of quintessential intoxicated Orient or as the inherent space of religious prohibitions. By introducing alternative epistemologies on mind-altering substances and their radical ontologies, this experiment in writing history as world-building shows how non-Western knowledge and practice can make other realities-and histories-possible.

The Mythological Machine in the Great Civil War (2001-2021): Oikos and Polis in Nation-Making.

The article revisits 'sectarianism' as an epistemic venue within the context of a Great Civil War in the Middle East (2001-2021), a label that includes the overarching narratives of political life in the aftermath of 9/11 up to the aftermath of the so-called 'Arab Spring.' By introducing the notion of the 'mythological machine,' it argues that 'sectarianism' is a myth, something that does not exist in real terms, but which has real world effects. The mythological machine is a device that produces epiphanies and myths; it is a gnoseological process, which has cultural, social and political effects through the generation of mythological facts and, as a machine, it does so through both guiding and automatized mechanisms. Through this interpretive shift, the article proceeds through several theoretical steps using a variety of cases from across West Asia and North Africa, contextualizing them within global political events. Firstly, the article argues that it is 'civil war,' shaped by the work of the mythological machine that governs state-society relations and transnational politics in the Middle East. Then, the article discusses how the mythological machine incorporates a semantic othering via mythological thinking, speak and practice that shapes the perception and experience of civil wars. To conclude, the article discusses how the mythological machine displaces people's status in the context of civil wars leading to the emergence of new forms of belonging and nation-making. Ultimately, the mythological machine creates what Giorgio Agamben defines as a state without people, a condition exhausting the value of citizenship and the political.

Critical policy frontiers: The drugs-development-peacebuilding trilemma.

Recent years have seen the emergence of a policy consensus around the need for fundamental reforms of global drug policies. This is reflected in the call for 'development-oriented drug policies' that align and integrate drug policies with development and peacebuilding objectives, as captured in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These calls have been important in acknowledging the damage caused by the war on drugs and in drawing attention to how drugs are inextricably linked to wider development and peacebuilding challenges. Yet there is surprisingly limited academic research that looks critically at the drugs-development-peace nexus and which asks whether the goals of a 'drug-free world', 'sustainable development' and 'the promotion of peace' are commensurate with one another, can be pursued simultaneously, or are indeed achievable. This articles studies these policy fields and policy-making processes from the geographical margins of the state - frontiers and borderland regions - because they offer a privileged vantage point for studying the contested nature of policymaking in relation to the drugs-development-peace nexus. We set out a historical political economy framework to critically assess the assumptions underlying the integrationist agenda, as well as the evidence base to support it. By developing the notion of a policy trilemma we are critical of the dominant policy narrative that 'all good things come together', showing instead the fundamental tensions and trade-offs between these policy fields. In exploring the interactions between these policy fields, we aim to advance discussion and debate on how to engage with the tensions and trade-offs that this integrationist agenda reveals, but which have to date been largely ignored.

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

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.

Under the bridge in Tehran: Addiction, Poverty and Capital.

The article provides an ethnographic study of the lives of the 'dangerous class' of drug users based on fieldwork carried out among different drug using 'communities' in Tehran between 2012 and 2016. The primary objective is to articulate the presence of this category within modern Iran, its uses and its abuses in relation to the political. What drives the narration is not only the account of this lumpen, plebeian group vis á vis the state, but also the way power has affected their agency, their capacity to be present in the city, and how capital/power and the dangerous/lumpen life come to terms, to conflict, and to the production of new situations which affect urban life.

The council of expediency: crisis and statecraft in Iran and beyond.

Giorgio Agamben argues that in contemporary governance the use of 'emergency' is no longer provisional, but 'constitutes a permanent technology of government' and has produced the extrajudicial notion of crisis. The engendering of 'zones of indistinction' between the law and its practice is what Agamben defines as a 'state of exception'. This article adopts the notion enunciated by Agamben and revisits it in the Islamic Republic of Iran. There, the category of crisis has been given, firstly, a juridical status through the institution of maslahat, 'expediency', interpreted in a secular encounter between Shica theological exegesis and modern statecraft. Secondly, crisis has not led to the production of a 'state of exception' as Agamben argues. Instead, since the late 1980s, a sui generis institution, the Expediency Council, has presided and decided over matters of crisis. Instead of leaving blind spots in the production of legislative power, the Expediency Council takes charge of those spheres of ambiguity where the 'normal' - and normative - means of the law would have otherwise failed to deliver. This is a first study of this peculiar institution, which invites further engagement with political phenomena through the deconstruction and theorization of crisis politics.

Designing and Evaluating the Validity and Reliability of the Persian Gambling Disorder Screening Questionnaire.

BACKGROUND: Gambling disorder (GD) and substance use disorder (SUD) have mutual impact and each could aggravate the effects of the other. This is the first study on GD among Iranian substance users to develop and validate a GD Screening Questionnaire-Persian (GDSQ-P). METHODS: Iranian male adults (n = 503) with SUDs were recruited via clustered sampling. Problem gambling screening instruments and Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5th Edition (DSM-5) criteria for GD were used to develop the tool which was sequentially assessed for face validity, content validity index (CVI), content validity ratio (CVR), and reliability (Kuder-Richardson coefficient). To establish construct validity, interviews based on DSM-5 as a gold standard method were used. A receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was conducted to determine sensitivity and specificity. FINDINGS: After removing items with low CVI values, 27 final items remained in GDSQ-P with impact score greater than 1.5. Card games (33.8%), dice gambling methods (26.6%), betting on sports teams and players (24.1%), and betting on horseback, rooster, pigeon, dog, or other animals (16.7%) were common gambling methods among participants. Overall Kuder-Richardson coefficient was 0.95. Cut-off threshold for GDSQ-P was calculated as 4.5 with 98.9% sensitivity and 98.3% specificity. The interviewers confirmed GD for participants based on DSM-5 as the gold standard. The prevalence of GD among participants was 17.9% based on GDSQ-P and 19.1% based on DSM-5 criteria. CONCLUSION: GDSQ-P is a valid and reliable tool to screen for GD in SUD treatment centers and probably in the general population.

Islam and cannabis: Legalisation and religious debate in Iran.

Iran is currently discussing cannabis and opium regulations, which could bring a legalisation of drug consumption through a state supervised system. The article engages with the question of cannabis by looking at the legal interpretation of religious authorities in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The choice of Iran is justified for several reasons: firstly, Iran has a long history of drug use and cannabis has been part of the country's intoxicant traditions since times immemorial; secondly, the Iranian state is unique in that it combines religious exegesis with political machination through official channels; finally, among all Middle East and Islamic countries, Iran is at the avant-garde in experimenting in the field of drugs policy which makes an excellent case for the study of cannabis regulation. The article is the result of a direct engagement with Iran's leading Shi'a authorities, the maraje'-e taqlid, 'source of emulation'. The authors redacted a list of eight questions (estefta'at) about the status of cannabis in Iranian society. It questioned cannabis' legality in Islam, its potential medical use, the feasibility of domestic production and other relevant aspects of its social-religious life. Based on the responses, the authors analysed the difference in opinions among the religious scholars and speculate on the possibility of policy reform. Given the dearth of scholarly work about illicit drugs in the Islamic world, about which many readers might not be familiar, the article opens with an overview of the place of cannabis in the history of Islamic societies. It discusses terminological ambiguities, references in religious texts and traditions, and the general interpretations within Muslim religious schools of thought. Then, it discusses the status of cannabis in contemporary Iran before tackling the responses provided by the religious scholars. Eventually, the paper puts forward reflections about the potential implications for future policy developments on cannabis.

Maintaining disorder: the micropolitics of drugs policy in Iran.

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.

Passive, Silent and Revolutionary: The 'Arab Spring' Revisited.

To counter the trend toward mechanization of research and aridity of critical analysis, this article makes a case for an interdisciplinary quest. To borrow Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze's phrase, we are convinced that 'everything is political, but every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics.' With an eye to open-ended research questions, this article attempts to build a body of theoretical, political and anthropological considerations, which, it is hoped, could function as a case of enquiry into the mechanics of power, revolt and revolution. The objective is to draw comparative and phenomenological lines between the events of the 2011 'Arab Spring,' in its local ecologies of protest, with its global reverberations as materialized in the slogans, acts and ideals of Greek and Spanish Indignados and the UK and US occupy movements. In order to do so, it proposes to clarify terminological ambiguities and to bring into the analytical scenario new subjects, new means and new connections. The article resolves to lay the ground for a scholarship of silence, by which the set of unheard voices, hidden actions and defiant tactics of the ordinary, through extraordinary people, find place in the interpretation of phenomena such as revolts and revolutions.

Characteristics of drug demand reduction structures in Britain and Iran.

Administrative structure of drug demand reduction and the way in which involved organizations interact with each other has been neglected by researchers, policy makers, and administrators at the national level and even in international institutions in this field. Studying such structures in different countries can reveal their attributes and features. In this study, key experts from the addictive behavior department of St George's University of London and a group of Iranian specialists in the field of drug demand reduction first wrote on a sheet the name of organizations that are in charge of drug demand reduction. Then, via teamwork, they drew the connections between the organizations and compared the two charts to assess the relations between the member organizations. In total, 17 features of efficient structure were obtained as follow: multi-institutional nature, collaborative inter-institutional activities, clear and relevant inter-institutional and intra-institutional job description, the ability to share the experiences, virtual institutions activity, community-based associations activity, mutual relationships, the existence of feedback sys-tems, evaluation, changeability, the ability to collect data rapidly, being rooted in community, flexibility at the local and regional levels, connection with research centers, updated policymaking, empowering the local level, and seeking the maximum benefit and the minimum resources. Recognizing the characteristics of substance related organizations in various countries could help policy makers to improve drug demand reduction structures and to manage the wide-spread use of psychoactive substances more effectively.