Iraq’s alcohol ban, one year on: How enforcement outpaced social policy
Shafaq News
One year after Iraq moved to shut down alcohol shops and restrict sales inside social clubs, the debate has shifted beyond questions of morality or legality to a more difficult issue: whether the state can regulate social behavior without building the systems needed to manage the consequences of that regulation.
Today, the country finds itself confronting a parallel and far more dangerous reality, an expanding narcotics crisis that has exposed deeper weaknesses in governance, coordination, and social protection.
The alcohol closures did not arrive overnight. Enforcement campaigns intensified gradually, driven by Interior Ministry directives and administrative measures that began to take clearer shape after the alcohol ban formally entered into force in early 2023. The legal basis for those measures dates back much further. In October 2016, Iraq’s parliament voted on the Municipal Revenues Law, whose Article 14 bans the import, manufacture, and sale of all alcoholic beverages, while imposing fines ranging between 10 and 25 million Iraqi dinars ($7600-19,000) for violations.
Despite parliamentary approval, the law remained dormant for years and was not published in the official gazette until March 2023, delaying its implementation due to several factors, chief among them Iraq’s war against ISIS at the time and concerns that enforcing a ban on alcohol could damage relations with the US-led Coalition. There were also fears that a Shiite-led government enforcing such a ban would face accusations of mirroring ISIS practices, which similarly prohibited alcohol in areas under its control.
Additional obstacles included multiple legal challenges filed before the Federal Supreme Court by Christian and Yazidi lawmakers and other parties, who argued that the law violated constitutional guarantees. Alcohol is not prohibited in Christian or Yazidi religious teachings, and many within these communities are directly involved in its production, trade, and sale. For them, the ban threatened livelihoods and clashed with Article 22 of the Iraqi Constitution, which states that “work is a right for all Iraqis in a way that guarantees them a dignified life.”
Once enforcement began, it unfolded unevenly across the country. Shafaq News investigations documented closures in Al-Diwaniyah, Baghdad, Saladin, and Al-Anbar, with the heaviest concentration in Baghdad, a province generally viewed as less socially conservative than many others. There is no official data on the number of shops shut down, but reporting by Shafaq News estimates that between 20 and 30 alcohol outlets have been closed since the law came into force.
Initially, large social clubs and several tourist facilities, including hotels, continued to serve alcohol despite the ban. This changed in late 2024, when the Interior Ministry moved to halt sales inside registered clubs and launched campaigns targeting shop owners. Supporters framed the measures as a corrective step aligned with public values, while critics warned that enforcement was racing ahead of planning.
The difficulty of implementation soon became apparent. While the law applies across federal Iraq, alcohol sales remain permitted in the Kurdistan Region and in Baghdad International Airport’s duty-free zone. These exceptions, combined with the outright ban elsewhere, contributed to the emergence of a black market and a rise in smuggling across borders, including from the Kurdistan Region into other parts of the country. Prices inside Iraq surged, in some cases doubling compared to pre-ban levels.
At the same time, Iraq’s struggle with narcotics was accelerating on a different track. According to data released by the Iraqi Ministry of Interior, drug seizures have surged by more than 360 percent, with authorities executing tens of thousands of arrest warrants and dismantling hundreds of trafficking networks, many with cross-border links. Courts have issued thousands of convictions, including life sentences and death penalties, as the anti-drug campaign evolved into one of the state’s most sustained security operations in years.
For some civil society actors, the timing of these two trajectories is impossible to ignore. Karim Ali Khalaf, head of the Seed of Hope Network for Community Peace, explains to Shafaq News that the alcohol closures were implemented in isolation, without a parallel national strategy to address addiction, social behavior, or youth vulnerability.
“Closing alcohol outlets without building preventive or treatment frameworks created a vacuum,” Khalaf says. “For a segment of young people, that vacuum was filled by drugs, more addictive, more violent in their effects, and far more destructive to society.”
Khalaf’s argument does not rest on morality, but on mechanism. Restriction, he suggests, altered access without addressing demand, leaving individuals —particularly younger Iraqis— without regulated social spaces or support systems. In that environment, more dangerous alternatives gained ground.
Adnan Al-Juhayshi, former head of parliament’s Anti-Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Committee, similarly describes the alcohol ban as a policy decision taken without sufficient impact assessment. He argues that the far heavier psychological and criminal consequences of narcotics use should have been anticipated. “Drugs pose a fundamentally different level of risk,” Al-Juhayshi warns in an interview with Shafaq News, pointing to the absence of planning that might have mitigated displacement toward more harmful substances.
Yet other experts caution against reducing Iraq’s narcotics crisis to a single policy choice. Sociologist Dr. Hassan Hamdan argues that the debate itself has become politicized, obscuring the deeper roots of the problem.
“Drug use is rooted in social alienation, economic marginalization, and weak institutional control,” he tells Shafaq News. “Iraq has experienced periods of alcohol restriction before without comparable drug epidemics. The current crisis is structural, not symbolic.”
Hamdan points instead to post-2003 instability, porous borders, and the rise of organized crime networks that have transformed Iraq into both a transit route and a consumer market.
This divergence among experts reveals that while there is no consensus on causation, there is broad agreement on systemic weakness. The alcohol closures may not explain the narcotics surge on their own, but they unfolded within a fragmented policy environment, one in which institutions moved independently, enforcement outpaced prevention, and social policy remained largely reactive.
Read more: Iraq fights back against synthetic drug flood engulfing the Middle East
Human rights advocates highlight a different dimension of the same gap. Mustafa Saadoun, head of the Iraqi Observatory for Human Rights, warns that prohibition-oriented policies not paired with public-health approaches often backfire.
“Drugs represent a direct threat to health and social stability,” Saadoun says. “When bans are enforced without prevention, treatment, or alternative social spaces, vulnerable groups gravitate toward riskier behavior.”
That imbalance is evident in how Iraq has approached the two issues. Alcohol restrictions were enforced administratively through closures and licensing constraints. The narcotics response, by contrast, has been overwhelmingly securitized, defined by raids, arrests, and harsh sentencing. While authorities highlight network dismantling and court verdicts as measures of success, critics argue that policing has become a substitute for a comprehensive strategy.
What emerges from the combined data and expert testimony is a warning about fragmented governance. Iraq restricted one behavior while confronting a far more lethal one, without integrating prevention, education, treatment, and social policy into a unified framework. The result is a state that reacts forcefully to symptoms while struggling to address underlying conditions.
Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.
