Sagg-e Zard

I was sitting on a domestic flight from Tehran when a man sat next to me, a middle aged grizzly Basiji Haj Agha, bearded, scruffy type wearing the usual uniform of the Islamic Republic's armed thuggery. At first I was very scared and was asking myself what the hell is this smelly guy sitting next to me, what have I done wrong, these guys usually have their own special seatings if not their own airplanes, but then I settled in and realized this must be just happening by chance and anyway what could I do now when the plane is about to depart and anyway I have not committed any "crime". Before and after the plane took off I noticed the Haj Agha chit chatting on his mobile phone/walkie-talkie. The flight attendant told him to turn off the phone but the man would every two minutes pick up and say some thing in there. I opened the conversation by asking him if he was going to visit family and he said he was going to visit his factory and will be back in Tehran next day. I asked about his factory and eventually led to him mentioning that he was a Sardar (General) of the Pasdaran and dealt with narcotics smuggling, now I do not know if he was saying the truth for a fact, but he was wearing uniform and by his looks I could imagine he had no problem killing a few infidels for the day. I started talking about the misery of addiction I see everyday on streets and how many friends and relatives I know who are suffering from addiction and that families are being torn and destroyed by drugs. He told me everyday the problem is getting worse and started laying the blame on the wealthier parts of the population that started making Cocaine fashionable and now there is a huge Crack problem across Iran, and then there is Methamphetamine known as (Shisheh) beginning to make an impact and of course heroin and opium is nothing new. I asked him what is being done to stop the flow of drugs and fix the problem, he said nothing can be done. He explained that it happens every week that they confiscate a trailer truck filled with heroin and opium in the east of the country, typically in Zahedan where they impound the vehicle and imprison the driver and then the following week they confiscate the same trailer with the same cargo on the western border of Iran, typically Bazargan border crossing to turkey. He was very comfortable to say that the government is accommodating the drug trade and he blamed the huge demand in Western Europe for the problem in Iran, he said the reason drugs are so cheap in Iran is that the drug traffickers are financing the transportation of the drugs to Europe, by selling parts of the shipments cheap in order to give a cut to officials or people in powerful positions who can pull strings. The Haj Agha continued to chat on his phone despite many warning from flight attendants and after we landed I said goodbye to the Haj Agha who seemed to like the conversation with me and asked for my phone number (this made me comically feel uncomfortable in many ways), of course I gave him a number where he could not reach me and when we got off the plane there were couple of other Haj Aghas waiting for him at the foot of the plane and he disapeared into the crowd. I hope he cannot find me, I was not in my assigned seat, just as a precaution I will have a supply of Vaseline close by.
Afterwards I thought hard if I should publish this post or not. I felt the impulse to do so just to open a window although limited it may be into the way things work in Iran, how we have regressed and how helpless the people are under a corrupt and totalitarian regime that has no aim than the hateful destruction of a nation and of families and to enrich themselves by any means. Now Iran has the highest rate of addiction in the world, there are official government reports of four million addicts when independent reports put it close to twenty million addicts and regular drug users in Iran, HIV infection is spreading like a wild fire. I think it is about time an investigation is done of the Iranian clerical establishment and its involvement in the narcotics trafficking. It has been said that the ubiquitous Rafsanjani family and also Ayatollah Vaez-Tabasi or otherwise know as the King of Khorasan are deeply involved in the drug trade, which not only includes trafficking and production in Iran, it also may very likely include production in parts of Afghanistan. Members of these drug cartels must be prosecuted and punished for crimes against humanity.