Mullah Karen Tandy

Jacob Sullum | February 18, 2005

The Drug War Chronicle notes that DEA Administrator Karen Tandy recently urged Pakistani religious leaders to issue fatwas against drugs, declaring, "Narcotics are against the teaching of the Holy Quran." As I explain in my book Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, there has long been controversy among Islamic scholars about exactly which substances are covered by the Quran's prohibition of khamr, a term often translated as "strong drink" that originally referred to grape or date wine. A minority of scholars maintain that only alcohol is forbidden, or even that only beverages made from grapes are off limits. Most say that anything essentially similar to alcohol is also forbidden, and then the disputes hinge on how similar and in what respects. (The Quran specifically condemns wine for causing enmity and for making people forget their duties to Allah.) But American judgments about which drugs should be banned clearly do not correspond to Quranic teachings, since Islam's paradigmatic forbidden drug is perfectly legal in the U.S. Conversely, there's no reason to think every drug the U.S. government has chosen to prohibit is also prohibited by Islam.