Alcohol Poisonings Rise in Iran, Where Bootleggers Defy a Ban

When a renowned Iranian artist hosted friends at his apartment in Tehran last month, he served, as he did often, a bottle of homemade aragh, a traditional Iranian vodka distilled from raisins, that he had secured from a trusted dealer.

His guests and his partner did not drink that evening, so he raised shot glasses to them and drank alone.

Within a few hours, the artist, Khosrow Hassanzadeh, 60, felt his vision blur. By the next morning, his sight was gone, he was delirious and short of breath. He was rushed to a hospital, where doctors diagnosed him with methanol poisoning from the aragh, according to his partner, Shahrzad Afrashteh.

Mr. Hassanzadeh fell into a coma that night and died two weeks later, on July 2. His death, from something as innocuous as having drinks with friends, shocked and infuriated many Iranians who have found ways around the Islamic Republic’s longstanding ban on the sale and consumption of alcohol, which is punishable by a penalty of up to 80 lashes and fines.

Rather than stopping drinking, the ban over time has led to a flourishing and dangerous bootleg market. In the past three months, a wave of alcohol poisonings has spread across Iranian towns big and small, with an average of about 10 cases per day of hospitalizations and deaths, according to official tallies in local news reports.

The culprit is methanol, found in homemade distilled alcohol and counterfeit brand bottles, apparently circulating widely, according to Iranian media reports and interviews with Iranians who drink, sell and make alcohol.

To many Iranians, the deaths are an example of how the Islamic Republic’s religious rules oppress ordinary citizens and meddle in their personal lives.

“Khosrow was taken from us because of the lack of social freedoms. It was you who took Khosrow from us,” Nasser Teymourpour, a fellow artist, wrote on Twitter, blaming the government for the alcohol-related deaths.

Iran is still reeling from a nearly yearlong uprising against the rule of the Islamic Republic, which erupted after a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, died in the custody of morality police on accusations that she violated a strict religious law requiring women to cover their hair and bodies. Many Iranian women are now defying the hijab rule and appearing in public with their hair showing.

After Mr. Hassanzadeh’s death, a collective of artists and writers in exile issued a statement saying that he was, “without a doubt, a victim of religious authoritarianism.” At his funeral, his partner screamed, “Don’t ever forget that they killed him.”

“Khosrow spent his entire life trying to preserve in his art certain ideals, rituals and lives of ordinary people in Iran. Drinking aragh is very much part of the socializing culture here,” said his partner, Ms. Afrashteh, in a telephone interview from Tehran, Iran’s capital. “It feels as if he was killed while practicing his own art. Now you can’t even have a drink without fear in Iran.”

The clerical rulers who took power after the 1979 revolution, instituting a theocracy, banned the consumption and selling of alcohol in accordance with Islamic rules prohibiting intoxication. Religious minorities are exempt. Over the decades, reports of methanol contaminations occasionally surfaced, but not in the scope and frequency seen in recent months.

Even officials are now publicly acknowledging that the problem has escalated. Mehdi Forouzesh, Tehran’s chief coroner, said in a news conference in June that the number of hospitalizations and deaths from methanol poisoning had sharply risen. In only Tehran, he said, it had climbed by 36.8 percent since the beginning of March.

From the beginning of May until July 3, at least 309 people had been hospitalized and 31 had died from methanol poisoning, according to Iranian news reports. But the real number is likely much higher because many cases go unreported out of fear of retribution for breaking the law.

At least one lawmaker recently called for government action to prevent deaths. Abbas Masjedi Arani, the head of Iran’s Forensic Medicine Organization, said last month that 644 people had died in 2022 from alcohol poisoning, a 30 percent rise from the previous year. Many victims permanently lost their eyesight.

The reason for the latest sharp increase in alcohol contaminations remains unclear.

“I don’t believe that some dealers have suddenly decided to kill their customers all at the same time,” said an alcohol producer and seller in Tehran who goes by Soheil, defending his trade despite the recent contaminations.

“Dealing and making homemade alcohol is already very risky in Iran,” he said. “Nobody wants to harm their clients and their business.” Dealers, if caught, could face jail, with their inventory confiscated or destroyed.

The authorities have attributed the increase in poisonings to reasons like the use of industrial-level alcohol in drinks, sloppy production, the greed of producers and a disregard for safety in search of a quick profit.

Many Iranians love to drink, and nothing has dissuaded them from a tradition deeply rooted in ancient Persian culture. Homemade alcohol and imported bottles of liquor flow freely at many parties, weddings and social gatherings. Some upscale restaurants secretly serve patrons vodka in pots of tea.

“Drinking alcohol has become a form of escape from our difficult circumstances and a way for us to experience some fun,” said Nina, 39, who like many interviewed in Iran asked that her last name not be used for fear of retribution. She said that the crisis of contaminations required proper oversight, but that she had little hope that the government would reverse course.

Some Iranians have turned to making their own liquor. Mostafa, 34, said he taught himself how to distill alcohol by watching videos on the internet because he was scared of buying the bootleg kind. He bought machinery for distilling rose water, took over a friend’s empty kitchen and began making aragh.

The police have discovered underground distilleries in a veterinary clinic, a roadside shack, a deodorant factory and abandoned warehouses. The business of bottled liquor can involve underground operations that pay scavengers to collect vodka and whiskey bottles from the trash to be filled with bootleg alcohol and sold as imported brand labels, according to interviews and media reports.

Experts say it is nearly impossible for an average consumer to detect deadly methanol, which does not smell or taste different from ethanol, in a drink. Home distillation increases the risk of methanol poisoning, they say, if the process is not carefully and properly executed.

Some Iranians shrug at the risks and down the shots. Others weigh their choices carefully, opting for one type of alcohol over another.

The choices can carry dire consequences. At a New Year’s party in Tabriz, a 49-year-old man named Majid drank whiskey that he thought was imported; within a few minutes, he was screaming in pain, and he died a few days later, according to his family. A man in Shiraz drank homemade aragh and became permanently blind.

Mr. Hassanzadeh, the artist, did not trust the bootleg brand bottles and preferred homemade aragh, relying on a dealer he trusted, his partner said. Friends have tried to contact the dealer, but he has not answered his phone. Someone spotted him at Mr. Hassanzadeh’s funeral.