Talk:Iran

Talk

Discussion for: Iran • View • Links • Related changes

Use this page for verification notes, disputes, and action items. Keep narrative content on the article.

Page scope

Iran is the Country page for Iran. Its cannabis material rests mainly on Ghiabi, Maarefvand, Bahari and Alavi (2018), the seed lines of The Real Seed Company from Khorasan and Sistan and Baluchestan, and three genomic studies of one panel of Iranian landrace accessions. Its accessions are listed by query on the page.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Infobox fields

• Legal status. "Illegal" with 1988. Ghiabi and colleagues date the first law making cannabis illegal to 1959 and the Islamic Republic's drug laws, with penalties equal to those for opium production and the death penalty in extremis, to 1988. The 1988 laws produce the current status, so they take the field; 1959 is given in the Legal status section.

Sources

• Ghiabi and colleagues 2018 (International Journal of Drug Policy 56: 121–127) is open access and was read in full. It is the source for the pre-Islamic and medieval record, the Sufi vocabulary, the legal dates, urban cultivation, gol and the survey of 19 maraje'-e taqlid. It does not tell the story of Qutb ad-Din Haydar.
• Qutb ad-Din Haydar. The legend is given as The Real Seed Company's, as its Iranian listing is recorded on RSC-IRN-UNK-0120190001, not from popular retellings.
• The Real Seed Company's sale history for the Khorasan collection (sold as collected until May 2022, as an open-pollinated reproduction since August 2022) comes from the archived captures of the listing, which the page cites.
• The genomic studies (Babaei and Torkamaneh 2026 in The Plant Genome; Babaei, Nemati, Arouiee and Torkamaneh 2026 in Scientific Reports; and Babaei and Torkamaneh's bioRxiv preprint of June 2026) all analyse the same panel of 145 Iranian landrace accessions. The preprint has not been peer reviewed.

Statements removed and why

• That Iran has "one of the longest documented records of cannabis use anywhere", and that Iranian landrace material is "unusually well represented" in genomics: no source ranks either.
• "With references in the Avestan texts": Ghiabi and colleagues say that a reference to a "sacred plant" in one Avestan hymn "is thought of [as] being a reference to cannabis". The page now gives that hedge.
• "The wiki documents four Iranian accessions", "its two documented landrace populations", "three of the studies ... catalogued on this wiki" and "the case the wiki can document": statements about the wiki's holdings.
• That the two lines "sit on the edges of the wide-leaflet drug-type region documented across the frontier": an inference, with no source for such a region.
• "Cannabis is not documented in Iran as a field crop on the scale of its neighbours'": it rests on what sources do not say.
• That Haydar is "the sheikh from whose name the medieval Arabic epithets for hashish derive": not in the listing the sentence cites.
• That neither Iranian line is "now sold as originally collected": no source was cited for the Baluchestan line.
• "Officials" noting the rise of gol, traditional users simply "giving way", and "most supporting medical use where it is supervised by the state": the source has one official (the head of the Drug Control Headquarters), the bangis replaced "in part", and the majority accepting medical use where research justifies it, with state supervision argued by some.
• "The religious position is less absolute than the legal one": a thesis in the article's voice; the survey result is given once, under Religious and cultural use.

Open questions

• Conservation status. No survey, characterisation or conservation assessment of Iranian landrace populations in the ground has been found. The genomic studies analyse Iranian material but do not measure what survives where.
• Demographics is a section stub. Ghiabi and colleagues describe a shift in who uses cannabis (under Preparations and consumption); no sourced account of communities with a standing relationship to the plant has been found.
• Trade and commerce is a section stub. No sourced account of the scale, value or routes of the Iranian cannabis market has been found. Iran is heavily documented as a transit and consumption country for Afghan opiates, and the seizure statistics that exist are mostly for opiates; extending them to cannabis would be an inference. The seizure chart of the 2009 Afghanistan Cannabis Survey covers Iran and is a possible starting point.