Black Crack in Iran

Creating an accurate picture of daily life in Iran is a difficult endeavor. Due to strict religious and moral codes, even photographing a woman inside her home without a scarf covering her head is all but impossible. Evidence of the censure of media in Iran has always been visible to Western nations, and has been brought to the forefront in the wake of the recent elections held there. 

But, Tehran has a drug problem. On the streets, in back alleys, and in small, crumbling, low-cost apartments, Iranian crack addicts are finding their fix in steadily rising numbers. The crack—a term used to describe many types of crystallized narcotics—currently flooding the streets of Tehran is different from that found in the West in a significant way: the “black crack” in Iran is made from heroin, not cocaine. Intent on documenting the plight of these masses of addicts, Aslon Arfa struck out into the underbelly of modern Tehran, camera in tow. The results of his mission, compiled here in Black Crack in Iran, are devastating images of men and women in the midst of a downfall. Some, including a young man with glazed eyes and infected burns stretching across his torso, are closer to the bottom than others.

Further complicating the documentation of the epidemic are the shame of addiction, the misunderstanding and disapproval of drug use by outsiders, and the lack of trust from suffering people whose sickness is also a crime punishable by death. Yet, after months spent in the trenches, Arfa has succeeded in bringing the closed-door activities of Iran’s most unseemly citizens to light in Black Crack in Iran.