Opium

We'd stopped the car somewhere in the dessert, but glistening drops of sweat formed and dropped down Amar's forehead not only from the 50 degree heat that invaded the interior of the vehicle now that we had switched off the air conditioning together with the engine.
Between his lips, the handsome, 30-year old Khuzestani Arab was balancing a thin, sort of joint-shaped paper funnel rolled up from a page of the palm-sized miniature Koran which was now again stowed away in the glove compartment. "That is the only thing the Koran is good for", he had joked when tearing out the sheet. Right now, Amar was sucking in greedily through its medium the creamy white whirls of smoke wavering up from the piece of opium he held before it. He had transfixed the smaller than fingertip-sized, roughly triangular morsel of the lightly earth-coloured drug on one sharpened end of a short piece of steel wire, a folded open paper clip. Holding it with a piece of tissue in front of his face, he used the other hand to heat up the second end of the wire with his lighter. Rubbing it over the surface of the chunk of drug sent up diminutive streams of thick white mists to be inhaled.
Of course Amar had offered me too to smoke, but I had declined.

I remarked that in Europe you would never be able to smoke opium like this. Even though the stuff retains some of the taste of the actual poppy plant, its consistency changes over the thousands of kilometers it has to travel from Central Asian Afghanistan. Opium has a texture a little bit like half-dry clay, which you can knead a little bit, but which can also fall to dust. Of course, opium is too precious, so you don't play around with it too much. While the drug retains the chlorophyll taste of the poppy plant all the way to the West, the texture of opium in Europe is drier, more brittle, more on the side of dust than wet clay. But here in Iran, its consistency was still gummy enough to pierce it on a tiny skewer without it falling apart.

It was the first time I saw someone smoke opium this particular way, although it was by far not the first time I came across this drug in Iran. A few times I had seen it on the countryside, being consumed by respectable, middle-aged men, smoking themselves pinhole-eyed before or after dinner, -or even lunch, actually. All over the country, whether North-East or Centre-West of Iran, I saw them using a bit shorter than underarm-long, dark wooden pipes with elegant ornamental carvings.

Before the revolution of 1979, Iran itself was an important producer of opium. Apparently in the 1950s still it was a perfectly acceptable practice to drink opium-spiked coffee or tea.
In today's climate, where much more effort is invested in repression of the traffic of alcohol, Islam's ultimate haram substance, Iran, as a transit country, has become invaded by drugs from Afghanistan. The drugs find a ready market among Iranians of all ages bored stiff by Islamic laws.