Narcotics Geopolitics and its impact on Iran’s eastern borders

oday, narcotics production and trade with a 3000 billion dollars capital turnover has become a geopolitical arena and thus can be referred as narcotics’ geopolitics. In this arena we face players in three local, regional and global levels. At the lowest level, i.e the local level, there are Afghanistan’s farmers who make the lowest profit from this illegal business despite the fact that they make great effort. At the second level , the smugglers are placed who transfer narcotics from Afghanistan to the regional markets and make different profits related to their activities. Finally, at the highest level, there are international mafia and drug cartels which are engaged in this dirty businesses at global level and while making the biggest profit, they are generally freet from prosecution and legal punishment. On the other hand, the production and smuggling of narcotics in Afghanistan has harmful consequences for its neighboring countries, particularly to the Islamic Republic of Iran. The findings of this study show that Iran’s neighborhood with Afghanistan, also, its location at the main route of drug smuggling threaten the security of Iran’s western borders in particular and Iran’s national security in terms of political, security, social and cultural, in general seriously . Drug and goods smuggling, illegal border crossings, human trafficking, increase in border conflicts and insecurity, increase in murder and felony, holding people for ransom in boundary regions, and etc. are some of these threats. This paper reviews the consequences of narcotics production and smuggling for Iran’s eastern boundary regions’ security ;using a descriptive-analytical method while explaining the narcotics geopolitics in Afghanistan.