Gol (گل)

Gol (گل) means flower in Persian, one of the most ordinary and pleasant words in the language: roses, gardens and poetry are full of it. In Iran, it also names herbal cannabis, particularly the dried flowering tops marketed as potent marijuana. It is a newer word than bang (بنگ) or hashish (حشیش), the older names tied to the resin and to older habits, and it is one name among several, not the only one Iranians use. The word belongs to a changing vocabulary in which the same plant can suggest an old habit, an international fashion or an educated urban identity, depending on what someone calls it.

Anthropologist Maziyar Ghiabi traces its promotion in Tehran around 2000 and its visibility on university campuses and in arts circles during the following decade. His chapter in Cannabis: Global Histories draws on fieldwork from 2012 onward, twenty-four extended interviews and Iranian media reporting from 2010 to 2019. It describes particular social worlds, rather than surveying every Iranian cannabis consumer.

A flower with an international image

Dealers presented gol as a cannabis product resembling the marijuana consumed in North America. Its appeal depended partly on claims of higher potency, but also on a different image from hashish, the separated resin long familiar in Iran.

For some affluent Tehranis, connections with relatives and travel abroad made cannabis flower part of a wider international culture. Ghiabi encountered it at private gatherings, film screenings, exhibitions and student social events. Informal theatre, music and poetry circles offered settings outside the university’s official codes of conduct.

This was a change in presentation and consumption, not the arrival of a previously unknown plant. Nor does the name identify a separate botanical species, a single strain or a standard chemical composition. Describing a purchase as gol does not establish its measured potency.

What the speaker claims

Ghiabi’s title, “We Smoke Flowers,” comes from the distinction his interlocutors made between themselves and the bangi, the hashish smoker. Calling cannabis a flower or an herbal product allowed some users to reject the identity of a drug user while consuming an intoxicant.

The contrast involved class and gender. Hashish could signal khaki, literally dusty: being down-to-earth and connected with working-class neighbourhood life. Students could adopt that image too. Gol acquired particular appeal among young urban women as well as men, including participants in mixed social gatherings.

These identities overlapped. Hashish could carry intellectual associations, while flower could express modernity and distance from an older smoking culture. Ghiabi records users describing gol as cleaner or less addictive. Those are beliefs about the product, not findings that establish its purity or health effects.

A vocabulary with several products

The chapter records several names circulating together. Their meanings depend on context; they are not a complete dictionary of Persian usage.

Term	Usage in Ghiabi’s account
Gol	Flower; herbal cannabis marketed with a modern image
Geras, sabzak, alaf, jay	Other names used for herbal cannabis
Bang, charas	Names used for hashish
Bangi	A hashish smoker, sometimes a disparaging social label

Some interlocutors even classified dark hashish as a kind of opium while treating flower as a different substance. The distinction reveals how appearance and stigma shaped understanding: cannabis resin is not an opiate.

From the greenhouse to the flowerpot

By the late 2010s the word had passed from users to the state. Police statements and news agencies called the plant mavad-e mokhadder-e gol, “the drug gol”. In August 2019 Tasnim reported that officers in Fasham, in the mountains north of Tehran, had found a golkhaneh, literally a “flower house”, the everyday word for a greenhouse, growing gol: twenty-three plants were seized and the grower arrested, and eight kilograms of gol were taken from another suspect in Darband. The plants were then set out in pots, with handwritten evidence labels, for the press photographers at a police display.

Such finds pointed to a change in supply. Hashish had mostly come in from Afghanistan; flower could be grown at home. A Tejarat News report described customs officers finding cannabis seed hidden in a lorry bumper from Afghanistan, and earlier in brushes, books, headphones and toys, and quoted an agricultural expert who said the new seed could be grown “without limit”, in greenhouses and even in houses and apartments. The paper warned that parents might not know what their children were growing in the garden.

Becoming an official concern

Iran’s 1959 prohibition preceded this urban vocabulary by decades. On July 3, 2017, a report cited by Ghiabi and colleagues attributed a striking claim to the head of the Drug Control Headquarters: gol had become the country’s second most commonly consumed drug after opium.

The statement marked official recognition of cannabis flower’s visibility. It did not make gol legal, and the cited passage supplies no population survey from which to independently calculate that ranking. Ghiabi’s later ethnography describes selective enforcement and spaces of practical tolerance during the 2010s; those observations concern how prohibition operated, rather than a legal exemption for people who called cannabis a flower.^[1][2][3][4]