Domestic Voices

Welcome back to the MBN Iran Briefing.

While the world continues to focus on diplomatic maneuvers and rejected peace plans, inside Iran they’re talking about internet access for the rich, drug addiction, and the price of pharmaceuticals.

Find out more below.

Share your thoughts, analysis and predictions with me at ailves@mbn-news.com. If you were forwarded the MBN Iran Briefing, please subscribe. Read me in Arabic here, or on the flagship MBN Arabic-language and English-language news sites.

As I often say in this newsletter, while the world’s eyes continue watching oil prices and the economy, human rights and what happens to the people inside Iran are an often-overlooked topic that doesn’t make headlines. Check out this salon about Iran. Jamie Fly, CEO of Freedom House, Caroline Fetscher freelance journalist and former staff writer at Tagesspiegel, MBN’s Roya Hakakian, and Shukriya Bradost from Virginia Tech discuss the fractured opposition movement, why Reza Pahlavi, son of Iran’s last monarch, hasn’t gained traction, and what everyday people can do to fight against Iran’s flagrant human rights abuses.

And don’t forget to check out the latest Iran Briefing podcast. In this edition I’m joined by MBN’s own Rami Al Amine and renowned former BBC journalist Pooneh Ghoddoosi as we look at the latest from Hezbollah and at how Iranians are coping.

Watch here or listen here.

Quote of the Week

“Authoritarian regimes do not always need an executioner’s rope. Sometimes, they simply wait for the human body to fail.”

— Nobel peace prize laureate Narges Mohammadi in her upcoming memoir, A Woman Never Stops Fighting

TOP OF THE NEWS

 

Inside Iran: What Domestic Sources Are Saying

Addiction treatment medication leaking into the black market. Photo: Tabnak

The diplomatic traffic between Tehran and Washington — featuring proposals, rejections, Pakistani mediators, and Truth Social posts — has consumed international coverage of Iran. Crowded out has been the parallel story of what is actually happening inside the country as reported by Iranian outlets, in Persian, to Iranian readers.

While diplomats argue about enrichment timelines and tolls in the Strait of Hormuz, the country at the center of those negotiations is coming apart in many ways. Domestic Iranian media in Persian paint a picture that is quite bleak, and it is not one of a population rallying behind its government in wartime. It is one of compounding institutional failure, accelerating economic collapse, and a state losing its grip on basic functions.

Photo: eghtesadonline

Internet … if you’re special. Last Thursday, a Tehran member of parliament, Amirhossein Sabet, confirmed that the blackout on international internet sites has no end date and will remain in place for as long as wartime conditions persist. The decision sits with the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), not with the elected government. President Masoud Pezeshkian’s office has called the restrictions unjust, while the Communications Minister has said internet controls “have no validity,” but neither has any power to change it. What the SNSC’s decision to block access has produced, in practice, is a paid connectivity system made available to favored institutions and businesses while the rest of the population stays cut off. Critics writing in domestic outlets this week called it digital class discrimination. Startups, freelancers, small businesses, families trying to reach relatives abroad: The people with the least political protection are bearing the heaviest cost of a decision made by the body least accountable to them.

Trying to connect to the internet in Iran. Photo: Reuters

An article in Eghtesad Online asks: “If free access to the internet is considered a security threat, does providing it in exchange for paying a higher price not pose a risk?” The report goes on to note that “after the ceasefire was established, a group of users have effectively gained access to the international internet by paying high amounts to purchase filter breakers.” In the words of a headline in Fararu, another Iranian site, last week: “The Internet: either for everyone or no one.”

None of this is the story the regime wants told. The official line, carried on state television, in state media dispatches, and in President Pezeshkian’s posts on X, is of a nation that absorbed the blow, held the line, and is now negotiating from a position of dignity rather than desperation.

The Communications Ministry’s deputy minister told a press conference on Saturday that he could not provide a timeline for restoring international internet access, and that the decision sits with security institutions beyond his ministry’s authority. That admission came the same day a special assistant to the interior minister told reporters that restrictions might ease within one to one-and-a-half months, based on the trajectory of negotiations.

The Communications Ministry deputy also explicitly rejected any comparison with China’s domestic internet model: Iran, he said, lacks both the population base and the economic structure to replicate China’s system of online access, and completing a national information network would require an investment roughly 35 times the Communications Ministry’s entire annual budget. In other words, the regime won’t restore the international internet, can’t build a credible alternative, and is unable to say when the situation will change.

The Federation of Iranian Business Consultants issued a statement this week calling the blackout no longer a “policy error” but a “structural risk to the economy,” warning of the erosion of digital businesses and the accelerating emigration of skilled workers who need stability and connectivity to stay.

Cafe in Tehran. Photo: Reuters

Drug addiction on the rise. During the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, Ayatollah Khomeini warned that substance abuse would be the most pressing problem facing Iran once the fighting stopped. That sentiment was later repeated by Ali Khamenei, his successor as supreme leader. Iran does indeed have one of the world’s most severe drug addiction crises. The regime’s own Drug Control Headquarters puts the number of drug-dependent individuals at 2.8 million, a figure its own officials have acknowledged understates the reality. Opium remains the dominant substance, but methamphetamine has become the fastest-growing drug of abuse, increasingly prevalent among younger users.

The Iranian press has lately been covering the addiction treatment sector, which seems to be collapsing. A report published by Tabnak on Friday details what has happened to Iran’s network of licensed addiction treatment clinics under wartime economic conditions. The sector employs more than 20,000 trained doctors and psychologists alongside 15,000 nurses and social workers, and until recently managed the treatment of approximately two million patients. Dozens of clinics have now declared bankruptcy and shut down, with the closures accelerating in recent weeks. The reason is the leakage of treatment medications out of the formal supply chain and onto the black market, where prices have surged to levels patients cannot afford. This applies above all to opium tincture, the primary maintenance drug used in addiction treatment. The head of the Iranian addiction treatment association warned that with clinics closing and medications unavailable through legitimate channels, patients are being pushed back toward uncontrolled substances, with a commensurate rise in overdose risk. The report puts the number of jobs at risk across the sector at thirty-five thousand. Addiction, the report states, will be the highest social cost of this post-war period as well, and the government needs to act now before the trend becomes irreversible.

Photo: eghtesadonline from khootoot.ir 

Pharmaceuticals. In fact the entire pharmaceutical supply chain is fracturing under the combined pressure of currency collapse, the removal of preferential exchange rates for raw material imports, and wartime disruption to normal supply channels. A member of the parliamentary health committee, Mohammad Jamalian, said last week that domestic drug manufacturers face a choice between raising prices and simply being unable to supply medicines, as the removal of the subsidized exchange rate that previously covered raw material imports has caused production costs to surge, with those costs passed directly to patients. Parliament has since formally opened an investigation into the drug shortage and pricing crisis, with ministers summoned to account for the breakdown. Pharmacists quoted in domestic reporting say they are selling to the same patients at several times the previous price, and that for some specialist medications patients can now obtain them more easily on the black market than through licensed pharmacies. The health minister stated that drug supply requires cross-institutional cooperation and that the ministry is working to manage shortages under current conditions.

HUMAN RIGHTS UPDATE

In last Thursday’s edition of my newsletter, I looked at the regime’s treatment of Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi and at the ongoing wave of hangings of those the Islamic Republic wants to get rid of. Here’s an update.

Narges Mohammadi

After appeals from her family highlighting her condition as critical, Narges Mohammadi was transferred to a hospital in Tehran yesterday, more than a week after first collapsing in prison. She is now at Tehran’s Pars Hospital, being treated by her own medical team, having arrived by ambulance.

Authorities granted a suspension of her prison sentence on bail, though the duration was not disclosed. In the words of a statement issued by the foundation bearing her name, “Narges Mohammadi require[s] permanent, specialized care. We must ensure she never returns to prison to face the 18 years remaining on her sentence.”

Her underlying conditions remain severe. She has a blood clot in her lung predating her imprisonment that requires blood thinners and continuous monitoring. At the cardiac unit she was placed in she was unable to speak and was dependent on oxygen, with blood pressure swinging between extremes.

Executions

Executed: Erfan Shakourzadeh. Photo: HRANA

The killing continues. At dawn today, the regime hanged Erfan Shakourzadeh, a 29-year-old satellite technology researcher and top-ranked aerospace engineering graduate student at Iran University of Science and Technology, at Ghezel Hesar Prison in Karaj, in secret, without prior notice to his family, and without a final visit. He had been removed from his ward at Evin Prison last Thursday under the pretext of a meeting with judicial officers and transferred to solitary confinement at Ghezel Hesar for the carrying out of his sentence. Before his execution, he published a note from prison: “I am Erfan Shakourzadeh, 29 years old, one of the few so-called elites who chose not to emigrate. A few months before the 12-day war, I was arrested by the IRGC Intelligence Organisation on baseless charges of espionage and collaboration with hostile countries. During eight and a half months of torture and solitary confinement, I was forced into making false confessions. Do not let another innocent life be lost in silence and without public awareness.”

ESSENTIAL READING

 

Photo: Reuters

Iran’s Internet Blackout and the “Internet Pro” System

“Iran’s Two-Tiered Internet Access Fuels Anger and Exposes Cracks in the Regime” – CNN, May 10, 2026. How the system works technically and how the public row over access has broken into the open between the SNSC and Pezeshkian’s government.

“Some People in Iran Have Kept Internet Access Despite Government-Imposed Blackout” — NPR, May 8, 2026. The clearest explanation of the tiered structure: “white internet” for regime loyalists, Internet Pro for approved businesses, nothing for the rest.

“Forced Offline for Most of 2026, Iranians Say They’re Struggling to Survive” – CBC News, May 10, 2026. Ground-level testimony from inside Iran on the human and economic cost, with an analyst putting direct daily losses at $250 million, and total daily losses, including impact on banking and traditional industry, as high as $3 billion a day.