Most of Iran's senior clerics tell researchers cannabis is not forbidden outright

In Iran drug law is made by the Expediency Council, and in 2015 that council discussed letting the state grow cannabis under a monopoly. A group of researchers then did something unusual: they wrote to the country’s highest Shia authorities and asked them what Islam says about the plant. Their paper, published in 2018, printed the answers.

Eight questions

The questionnaire went to nineteen marja’, the scholars whose rulings believers follow. Eight replied. They were asked:

• whether using cannabis is permitted, and whether it may be used to treat illness
• whether it may be grown for medicines, and grown for export
• whether hashish is ritually impure
• whether a patient may use it while fasting, and whether prayer is valid afterwards
• whether art may show its use

What they said

Scholar	On use
Ali Sistani	Not forbidden in itself; intoxicating or harmful derivatives are. Growing and export allowed
Naser Makarem Shirazi	Amounts that do not intoxicate are not prohibited; pharmaceutical growing under strict supervision is acceptable
Asadollah Bayat Zanjani	No objection where there is no significant effect; controlled pharmaceutical production allowed
Hossein Mazaheri	Use and production of hashish not permitted
Mohammad-Reza Modaressi Yazdi	The plant is allowed, hashish is not; medical use a sin

Six of the eight treated the lawfulness of cannabis as conditional: it depends on whether it intoxicates and whether it harms. Most accepted medical use if research justified it. All eight held that hashish is not impure. Most said that using it breaks the Ramadan fast, and that prayer afterwards is valid if the person understands what they are saying.

The authors noted that eleven did not answer, and suggested that some of the politically prominent may have preferred not to.

An old argument

The question is centuries old. Hashish spread in Persia after the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century and was used by Sufi orders; physicians prescribed the plant. The jurist Allameh Helli, who died in 1325, ruled that hashish intoxicates and may not be eaten, but is not impure. The first modern penal law, in 1926, punished only public intoxication. Cannabis was banned in 1959.

Why the index did not move

A scholar’s answer is not a law. Iran’s Anti-Narcotics Law still punishes possession of small amounts with fines and lashes and large-scale trafficking with death, and the proposal of 2015 was never approved. The authors’ own conclusion was that most of the scholars do not consider cannabis forbidden outright and that most favour regulated, supervised medical use.^[1]