Should We Pity Addicts?

“For a bowl of rice... you were forced to crawl and bark”. 

These words by Ahmad, a survivor of a drug camp called Shourabad in Kerman, painfully yet vividly illustrate the dehumanising violence suffered by people who have been forced into these camps over the past decades.^[1] While a significant number of people have passed through Iran’s Justice system in relation to drug offences or have been forced into rehabilitation camps, their suffering and experiences of violence have barely been registered. 

Language and images construct the frames through which we apprehend others, see their suffering and choose whether and how to respond to it. They are key components of how the “notion of recognizable human”^[2], one whose injury or loss of life causes moral revulsion, grief, and a call to action, is formed. Dehumanising language and representations often precede and accompany mistreatment of groups of people and even genocide and the annihilation of an entire people. They facilitate such destruction by first making the humanity, individuality, interconnectedness and interdependence of those who are to be destroyed easily ignorable and even deniable. They make the work of those oppressing, torturing, and killing easier, as in their eyes, those they subject to cruelty are not really and truly human while the society as a whole loses its moral revulsion towards such atrocities. 

State violence has characterised the past four decades of life in Iran. There hardly exists any group, other than those remaining strictly faithful to the system and its ideologies, who has not fallen victim to State violence. Of these groups, people who use illicit substances have remained among the most marginalised, both in life and in the violent deaths the State has imposed on them. They were among the first groups of people who were removed from the protection of the law following the 1979 Revolution. Hundreds were subjected to extrajudicial and summary executions shortly after the Revolution and thousands more were killed in the years to come. The Omid Memorial^[3] has painstakingly recorded 5846 executions and, where possible, the names and stories of those whose lives have been taken for drug related offences since 1979. Undoubtedly, there remain many more names and stories that are yet to be recorded and remembered. Those who have been spared the gallows, have been subjected to cruel and tortuous treatments. Some have been sent to forced labour camps, digging trenches at borders in harsh conditions, and some banished into an “island” isolated from the rest of humanity.^[4] Many have been sent into ‘rehabilitation’ camps where they have been deprived of the most basic necessities such as food and water and access to toilets. Beatings and humiliation have remained commonplace methods of treatment in these camps. Despite changes in Iran’s drug policy over the past decades, dehumanisation of people who use substances persists. What is the nexus between language, images and treatment that dehumanise people who use substances and the violence that is committed against them and why should we all care about the manner in which people who use drugs are depicted?

Dehumanisation and its consequences 

Dehumanisation is defined in numerous ways.^[5] Here, I ground my definition of dehumanisation in Bulter’s concept of grievability. In the words of Bulter “Some lives are grievable, and others are not; differential allocation of grievability that decides what kind of subject is and must be grieved, and which kind of subjects must not, operates to produce and maintain certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human; what counts as livable life and a grievable death.”^[6] This differential allocation of grievability means that some lives, those that are not apprehended as living in the first place, those who are “neither alive nor dead but interminable spectral”^[7] cannot possibly be perceived as lost or injured. This grievability is built upon an already “established field of perceptible reality”^[8], of which images and language dehumanising certain groups of people are part and parcel. 

Dehumanisation, therefore, enables us to conceive of certain groups of people as subhuman creatures.^[9] Perceptions of others as subhuman or less human are conveyed, perpetuated and strengthened through the use of language and visual representations that depict them as such. They establish the norms that govern who is a human and make us senseless when lives that are not considered grievable are eradicated. Dehumanisation has long historical roots but its manifestation takes similar patterns across centuries, continents and countries. Those who are the target of dehumanising rhetoric are often described as impure, filthy, repulsive, animalistic and as sources of disease that can easily pollute the rest of the society. As such, they are frequently portrayed by images or textual descriptions that connotate ‘vermin’ and ‘pests’.  Dehumanised groups are also routinely depicted as inherently criminal and essentially predatory, who, if given the chance, will attack and destroy. 

The ultimate message of such representations is that those posing such threats to ‘humanity’ not only could, but should be eliminated. As Butler says “When a population appears as a direct threat to my life, they do not appear as ‘lives,’ but as the threat to life.”^[10]  It thus comes as no surprise that dehumanisation and dehumanising rhetoric have loomed large in some of the most horrific atrocities in our history. In the Rwanda Genocide of 1994, in which an estimated one million people, the overwhelming majority of whom were Tutsis, were brutally killed, the target group had been dehumanised long before the acts of killing took place. Prior to the genocide and while it was unfolding, Hutu propaganda, in particular Radio Télévision Libre de Mille Collines (the RTLM), allied with leaders of the government, routinely and systematically described the Tutsi as ‘cockroaches’ and ‘snakes’ inciting the Hutu population to eradicate the manance. 

Perhaps, the most documented and vivid example of dehumanisation of a people is the Holocoust. Dehumanisation of Jews, deep rooted in centruties of anti-semitism, played a central role in the Nazi programme of annihilating the Jewish people. Representation of the Jewish people as ‘dirty swines’, ‘rats’, and ‘parasites consumed by money’ in films and posters, among others, had turned Jews into subhuman creatures in whose destruction the society was willing to take an active part or at best chose to remain senseless and silent towards it. 

Dehumanisation, through rhetoric, facilitates violence upon those who are no longer seen as human. This violence in turn perpetuates and facilitates dehumanisation. The process of transformation from human to subhuman is illustrated in an interview Gitta Sereny conducted with Franz Stangl, the ex-commander of Treblinka. In this interview, Stangl speaks about the process in which for him Jewish victim of the Holocaust had turned from human beings into “cargo”; that is after standing next to “pits full of blue-black corpses.” The indignity with which the remains had been piled on top of each other made Stangl believe that this could not have anything to do with “humanity” and that “it was a mass - a mass of rotting flesh”. He further elaborated that, “I rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a huge mass. I sometimes stood on the wall and saw them in the tube. But – how can I explain it – they were naked, packed together, running…”^[11] 

Primo Levi, Italian Jewish chemist, writer and Holocaust survivor makes a reference to this interview in his book, Drowned and the Saved, where he writes about “useless violence”, what he elaborates on as violence that is carried out “as an end in itself, with the sole purpose of inflicting pain.” He recounts numerous examples of the extremely violent treatment of Jews in concentration camps and while being transported to the camps, a treatment he states was intended to declare that neither they nor their remains were human. He recounts an excerpt of the interview in which Sereny asks Stangl, “Considering that you were going to kill them all… what was the point of the humiliation, the cruelties?” To this Stangl replies, “to condition those who were to be the material executors of the operators. To make it possible for them to do what they were doing.” As Levi concludes, “before dying, the victim must be degraded, so that the murderer will be less burdened by guilt.”^[12] This, in his words, “is the sole usefulness of useless violence”.

Dehumanisation of people who use drugs in Iran through language and visual representation 

While dehumanising representations, in particular the use of language that demeans and dehumanises persecuted individuals and groups in Iran such as Baha’is, ethnic minorities and the LGBTI community, has rightly received some level of attention (although much more needs to be done) similar representations of certain marginalised groups such as people who use illicit substances have largely gone neglected. In fact, the use of such language when it comes to people who use drugs has become so normalised that it may not even be registered and noticed as dehumanising. 

A simple online search of the word “addict” brings up pages after pages filled with images depicting people who use substances in the most undignified manner. In these images, individuals are often seen in groups, in masses, squatting or sitting in corners of streets, back alleys or under bridges clumped together. They are generally depicted in torn and unclean attire with their heads down. Some are depicted while using a substance, with cigarettes in their hands. Some are visibly unwell, lying down on the ground and showing withdrawal symptoms or are possibly under severe influence of the substance they have taken. Other images show law enforcement conducting raids, arresting and transferring people. In many of these images people are seen covering their faces either by their hands or their clothing, clearly demonstrating an unwillingness for their images to be taken and published. They nonetheless fill the pages of all major media outlets publishing news pieces on people who use drugs in Iran. 

Although in many instances - albeit not all - these outlets blur and conceal the faces of individuals in order to not reveal their identities, a simple tactic of blurring their faces, does very little to alleviate the grave and far-reaching consequences of the persistent publication of such images. In fact, the blurring of the faces of people who are only depicted in masses and in this manner, in itself contributes to the process of deindividualising them. The publication of these photos demonstrates very little respect to the agency of people who use drugs. These photos are clearly taken while individuals are in an extremely vulnerable state in which consent, even if sought, may not necessarily be informed and genuine. Moreover, the manner in which people in these images are pictured deindividualises them. People who use illicit substances are depicted as ‘filthy’ ‘masses’, lumped together on the streets; a flock of undesirable subhumans void of agency and individuality. 

A similar search of the word/s “addict” or “flagrant addict” brings an endless list of pages in which officials, including prosecutors, police and municipality officials, discuss whom they described as “flagrant addicts” with dehumanising language. A large number of these references belong to media interviews or announcements reporting on the “removal of addicts from the streets.” The terms and phrases used in these statements often connotate “stray animals” “vermins”, “filth, and “disease”. For example, numerous statements and announcements promise people that their streets have been “cleansed” from “the filth of drug addicts” or from their “dirty existence”. In these statements, which become more prevalent before special occasions such as Norouz when people travel across the country, people who use substances are “gathered” or “collected” from the streets or are “released” back into them as if they were ‘garbage’ or ‘vermin’ that pollute and contaminate the city, not only figuratively but literally. 

What could dehumanisation attitude towards people who use illicit substances lead to? The extrajudicial killings of possibly tens of thousands of people in the Philippines in the hands of police forces and vigilantes under Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs, is a vivid and devastating example of the interconnectedness of dehumanisation and mass atrocities against people who use substances. Duterte’s clear instructions to the police and citizens to kill anyone connected to the drug trade has been accompanied with dehumanisation of people who use drugs, in particular through their portrayal as the “living dead”, “the walking dead” and “zombies”.^[13] Such representations not only depict people who use drugs as a menace to the society, but as beings who are not truly living and thus cannot be grieved if lost. In fact, the Philippines’ authorities have explicitly stated that their war on drugs cannot possibly constitute crimes against humanity as those who use drugs are not part of humanity. In 2016, Duterte - responding to the allegations by international human rights organisations and the UN - asked “[W]hat crime against humanity? In the first place, I’d like to be frank with you, are they (drug users) humans? What is your definition of a human being? Tell me.”^[14] Similar statements have been routinely repeated by other state officials. For example in 2017, Justice Secretary, Vitaliano Aguirre II, stated “drug lords, drug addicts’ and ‘drug pushers’ are ‘not humanity’, while in February 2018, Senate Majority Floor leader, Vicente Sotto III - responding to the International Criminal Court’s preliminary examination to the situation in the Philippine^[15] stated, “I think that the charge can’t be. When you say “crimes against humanity”, who is the humanity being mentioned? Are drug pushers and stubborn drug users considered part of humanity?”^[16]

Iran’s drug policy has seen improvements from the early days of the Revolution. More harm-reduction oriented policies have been adopted since. Nonetheless, Iran’s drug policy remains heavily punitive and in violation of international law. Over the past few decades, thousands of people have been executed for drug-related offences in flagrant breach of international law and standards. They have been tried in Revolutionary Courts in proceedings that violated the most basic guarantees of fair trial and for years, they were denied even the right to appeal their death sentences. Although there have been changes in the law resulting in a decrease in the number of drug-related executions, the death penalty for certain drug offences has remained in place and continues to be used in violation of Iran’s international obligations. 

Moreover, substance use continues to be criminalised^[17] and individuals identified as “addicts” are obligated to seek treatment in government or private rehabilitation centers, many of which, due to lack of adequate oversight, are illegal and effectively underground. Individuals who use illicit substances are generally admitted to rehabilitation camps without their consent by the authorities or their families. Human rights organisations have raised serious concerns about the compatibility of rehabilitation methods used in these camps with international human rights standards and evidence-based health approaches. Reports of torture, illtreatment and punishments of people who use drugs in camps are prevalent.  For example, there are reports of people being thrown into cold water in winter and being subjected to beatings and denied of sufficient and adequate food.^[18] 

Changing the frame 

The importance of the frames through which people use illicit substances has been highlighted in recent years. Harm reduction experts, academic journals and human rights organisations have increasingly drawn attention to the use of language and visual representation when it comes to people who use illicit substances as they shape the way society perceives substance use and people who use them. One important shift has been towards the use of language that ensures respect of personhood and dignity of people who use substances. The use of “people-first language” has meant that terms such as “addict” or “alcoholic”, which depersonalise individuals and deprive them of individual qualities, have been replaced with phrases such as ‘people who use substances’ or ‘a person with addiction’. This “people-first language” places the words describing individuals’ behaviors or conditions only after the words referring to the individuals themselves thus ensuring that one’s whole being is not reduced to one aspect of their characteristics or behaviour.^[19] 

These changes in language are important, not as mere gestures but as what helps resisting dehumanising attitudes. As Butler says “Certain faces must be admitted into public view, must be seen and heard for some keener sense of the value of life, all life, to take hold.”^[20]