Ashkan Sahihi (above) is an Iranian/German pho- tographer who is infuriated by the war on drugs. “I find it despicable,” he says. “If the American government was really concerned about stopping drug abuse, things like legalization and free needle programs would at least enter the discussion. In the absence of that, all we have is a silly political tool to please the Christian right.”

It is this hypocrisy that inspired Sahihi to take eleven people out of their daily environments and get them high. He chose eleven different drugs and fed them to subjects who were relatively foreign to the drug they were doing. “It was difficult finding people that hadn’t done a lot of drugs. No matter what the race, class and background everyone seemed to have tried x and coke and other drugs. Only crack was untouched by most.”

When you go to see Sahini’s work in a gallery the reaction is almost always the same. A guy drifts by all the portraits in a matter of seconds until his girlfriend grabs him and says, “Don’t you get it? All these people are high.” Then he stops and goes over each shot incredibly slowly. They both laugh and share stories about what they did when they were on that drug and then they stop the next couple and say, “Hey, these people are all high.” And so on.

Here are his comments on the eleven people he photographed and the drugs they did.