In the name of the Almighty
The thirteenth session of the 85th round of Congress 60 educational workshops for travelers and companions was held with the guidance and guardianship of Mr. Hossein Dezhakam, and with Ms. Nilsa serving as secretary. The agenda for this session was “The Problem Statement of Addiction,” and it began on Wednesday, September 24, 2025, at 10:00 a.m.
Hello friends, I’m Hossein, a traveler.
I hope you’re all well; thanks to God I’m doing fine. Today is 2 Mehr 1404 (September 24, 2025). We’ve entered autumn, the trees are shedding their leaves and showing off their best colors. The weather is lovely for this season. It’s five minutes to 10 a.m., and we’re here in the Academy building.
Because today’s agenda starts just like the first day of the school year, we’ll follow the same rhythm: from today we begin those agenda items. First, we’ll cover the “Problem Statement of Addiction,” then move through Wadi One up to Wadi Fourteen, continuing until the end of this year and into the next.
Before I talk about the problem statement, I want to tell a memory. I’ve told it once before; it’s about some of the old Congress 60 members. Back then we used opium, there was no opium syrup. People smoked opium, and we counted puffs. For example, someone would ask, “How many puffs do you take?” He’d answer, “Seventy-five, or one hundred and fifty,” then set down a little notebook and mark an X on the paper for every puff, gradually reducing the number of puffs that way.
Once I went to Tabriz to register Shani at university. A friend of ours was there, he was a traveler, and he happened to be on his last one or two puffs. Since I knew him and was his guest, I was there with him. I asked, “How many puffs are you going to take now?” He said, “Now’s the time I usually smoke.” I said, “Go ahead then.” He hesitated, saying he couldn’t do it in front of me. I kept insisting: “Come on, do it like you would if I weren’t here, just do exactly the same thing.” He finally agreed to take one puff so I could see.
What he did was something else, he’d brought a big pin, and he had about one, two, three grams of opium shaped like little kebab pieces and skewered on it. He put two skewers over the stove, and he’d made a big paper funnel in front of the pipe. When the skewers turned red-hot, he inhaled deeply and held it, then released. He took one skewer, warmed it, drew in the smoke, set it down, and then grabbed the other skewer and did the same. I watched him: in just three puffs he had inhaled the whole three grams of opium.
So, what’s the point of this story? The result is that sometimes people come to us and say, “I’m on Jones’s program, but no matter what I do, I’m not losing weight. I had a salad, and then I had lunch too.” But let’s look closely, how did you eat your lunch? You had a salad just twenty minutes before!
I’ve never in my entire life seen anyone who became full from food in the real sense. No one should ever say, “I must eat until I’m completely full.” That way of thinking is completely wrong. It doesn’t work for weight loss, and it doesn’t work for weight gain either.
There’s an old saying: “The straw may not belong to you, but the barn does.” Your stomach is yours, but the food is not. You can’t just dump everything into your stomach, stuffing it so full that you can’t even breathe. When it comes to eating, you should never eat until you’re full. You should stop while you’re still one, four, or even seven or eight bites away from fullness. That’s how you train your body, little by little, to shrink the stomach’s capacity.
Now, someone joins Jones’s Legion, eats their eggs, eats their salad, that’s fine. But then how much do they eat at lunch? They say, “I’m following the program; it says to eat one meal, so I eat it.” But the way they eat that one meal is just like taking a massive puff of opium in one go! Then in the afternoon they want some fruit, and in the evening, they have a big dinner again, as if nothing has changed. Well, it doesn’t work like that.
We need to hold ourselves accountable and follow the program properly. Before you feel full, before you get to that point, you must stop eating. Leave those last three or four bites so you can still breathe easily, move comfortably, and let your body work. The food you eat has to be digested; it requires energy and blood circulation for that process. That’s why in eating; this principle must always be kept in mind. It’s an extremely important point.
There’s another point I want to mention. Some of the members travel to other cities, for example, we even had a female traveler from another city. She left from here and flew somewhere else. Later, some people said, “Since she came from Tehran, let’s invite her to lunch.” So, ten or fifteen people gathered, collected money, and bought a lunch for her. Isn’t that a bit… embarrassing? Just the flight alone costs tens of millions of tomans.
The thing is she doesn’t need your lunch; she can go eat outside or even pay for her own meal, and that’s absolutely fine. But pooling money among a few people, each giving a hundred or fifty tomans, just to buy lunch for someone who came all the way from Tehran, that’s actually embarrassing. It’s not really in the spirit of true hospitality.
These kinds of situations are guided by some unwritten rules, not formally documented anywhere. But we need to consider our culture and mindset. Hospitality, how we welcome guests, is important. We should keep in mind how we interact with people who travel hundreds of kilometers, by car or by plane, often every week, just to help out.
For instance, take Isfahan. When we were getting it started, I remember we calculated that the members traveled more than two or three hundred thousand kilometers collectively, back and forth, until the first person reached recovery there. Khodami, Ahmad, Amin, they all went back and forth. Over the course of a year, that’s how much effort it took for just one person to achieve freedom from addiction.
So, this is a cultural point we must hold in our hearts. These guests don’t expect anything extravagant, but we must be aware, act respectfully, and honor those who serve us. Think about it: someone living two steps away from the Congress might arrive thirty minutes late, while someone who traveled all the way from Tehran could be three hours early. Traveling by plane isn’t easy, there’s getting to the airport, taking a ride, checking in luggage, security checks, it’s a lot of effort.
We must recognize and value those who dedicate themselves to serving others. Their effort deserves our respect and appreciation.
Today’s agenda is “The Problem Statement of Addiction.” This is a broad issue that applies to all our challenges , not just addiction. Until a problem is clearly defined, how can we even know what we want to do? How can we reach a solution?
When we talk about addiction, the first thing to do is understand what addiction really is, and only then can we look for solutions. Some say, “Addiction has no cure, there’s no definitive treatment.” But if that were true, then everything is over , there’s no point in discussing it at all. If it has no treatment, there’s no question to answer. When someone says, “There’s no treatment,” the natural follow-up is: “So, how long does treatment take? And how should we treat it?” This shows why the problem must be clearly defined.
We need to specify whether addiction is a mental illness, a physical illness, or a combination of both. I am correct in saying it involves the body, the mind, and worldview , but the main issue, as I’ve said from the beginning, is physiological. That’s based on evidence. Why physiology? Because we’ve done experiments on rats. We tested Fentanyl, opium, and amphetamine on rats, and they fully recovered. Rats don’t have a worldview, they don’t have mental issues.
Even thirty years ago, I said: I have fully addressed addiction , everything within it, I’ve examined and resolved. And today, I am saying the same thing I said thirty years ago. Nothing significant has changed in addiction itself. Some things have been added in terms of substitution therapies or internal gland function, or the X system, but now we have modern tools to study these mechanisms precisely: microarrays, sequencing, iPSCs, and multiple measuring devices. We are even working on stem cells, studying how changes occur at the cellular level, and understanding how these changes fully manifest within the system.
iPSCs are just one example. We take cells, develop various types in the lab, and study them in different forms. So you see, everything really comes back to physiology.
So, what exactly is craving? We have to understand what craving is before we can treat it. Some say, “Avoid places where people smoke opium, don’t go with your old friends, don’t think about your past memories.” They imagine addiction as primarily a mental or psychological disease , something you can solve through mental strategies alone. But that’s because the problem hasn’t been clearly defined. The definition itself is wrong.
For instance, some call addiction a toxic disease , a chronic poisoning. That definition is completely wrong. And if the definition is wrong, who can possibly treat it? Not even Afrasiab could. Because if addiction were simply poisoning, then drugs would have to be toxins. But which drugs are actually poisons? Amphetamine is a medication, THC is a medication, morphine is a medication, opium is a medication, heroin is a medication. None of them are poisons. That definition is false.
Others say addiction is merely drug dependency , again, that’s a wrong definition, and it doesn’t lead anywhere.
The first thing we did in Congress 60, the first step we took, was to clearly define the problem: what exactly is the problem of addiction? We observed carefully and found that when someone using opium stops, the first thing that happens within 24 hours is diarrhea. Then comes bone pain. Next, insomnia. Then thick saliva in the throat. Then constant sweating. Then repeated sneezing. These are all part of the opium withdrawal syndrome.
So, if we say addiction is a mental disease, did diarrhea happen because of a mental disease? Did the insomnia happen because of a mental illness? Did the bone pain come from a mental issue? That’s absurd. You can see that none of these symptoms are mental, they are all physiological. Bone pain, sweating, sneezing, diarrhea, insomnia, even sexual problems, all of these are rooted in physiological imbalance, not the mind.
Now you want to fix this? Without medicine? Without any substances? How exactly do you plan to fix it? “Non medication treatment,” they say. But such a thing doesn’t even exist. How can you treat without medication? Many university professors, doctors, psychiatrists , they all nod and say “yes, non medication treatment.” But really, how could that even be possible?
I’m an engineer, not a doctor; yet even from an engineering point of view, it’s impossible. Can you rebuild a building without any materials? Rebuilding with materials, yes. But rebuilding without materials? That’s simply impossible.
We’ve worked on this with lab rats. In fact, everything I said thirty years ago is now being confirmed by today’s modern equipment. We tested amphetamine on seventy two rats. The paper has been accepted in the U.S. and will be published any day now. We’ve done the same with fentanyl , that study is under review , and with opium as well.
We first addicted the rats to opium, then treated them using the DST method, methadone, naltrexone, “free fall” detox, buprenorphine, every approach. How did we treat with methadone? Exactly according to the existing protocols. With naloxone? According to the same standard methods. With B2? The current Ministry of Health protocols. And we also treated with DST.
Then we compared the results. When the rats became addicted, certain gene expressions went out of balance. What does “gene expression” mean? We have various systems in the body , for example, the immune system , which function under the supervision of certain genes. The genes themselves don’t directly do the work; it’s their expression that does.
Think of it this way: the gene itself is like a holy book , like the Qur’an. The DNA is the text itself. But the reading, the recitation, the sound produced from it , that’s the expression.
A gene is a living entity on its own. Take TNF-alpha, for example, it’s a gene with its own expression and specific functions. It gives instructions: produce this, release that. For instance, “Now produce sodium, now produce potassium, now make this protein.” We observed that addiction damages many of these instructions. The immune system is disrupted, the dopaminergic system, which produces dopamine, goes out of control. The serotonergic system loses its balance. Synapses and genetics, the connections between neurons, also develop disruptions. Inside the cell nucleus, in the mitochondria, there are malfunctions too. Across many circuits and critical systems in the body, multiple disturbances occur because our bodies work like electrical circuits, with many pathways regulated by gene expression.
For example, imagine that in all of our bodies, cancerous activity is constantly occurring. But the body keeps it in check. How? This is where understanding gene expression becomes important. There’s a gene called P53 in the body. It acts like the body’s police. When something starts to go wrong, P53 immediately acts to fix it. If cancer starts spreading in a certain part of the body, P53 raises the alarm, and other mechanisms come in to repair it. So P53 is like a gene acting as the body’s police, always ready to intervene immediately.
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You see, there are many circuits in our bodies that govern all our vital functions, and in an addicted person, these circuits are completely out of control. Now, we want to treat them. When they’re out of control, this is called “dysregulation.” “Regulation” means balance, “dis” means the opposite, everything has gone off balance.
So, we treat it. After treatment, we check the results. We say: “Let’s treat this with DST.” When we did, everything was balanced; everything was in its proper place, restored and rebuilt. When we tried methadone, it was a disaster, it caused many new disturbances. We’ve written articles on this, and they’ll be published soon. I’ve also presented these findings in medical conferences.
With naltrexone, it was also disastrous. Free fall detox? Again, disastrous. From this, we realized: so much for “chronic poisoning” or “drug dependency”! Many vital physiological circuits, which govern our sleep, our work, our happiness, our mood, our sexual function, all rely on biochemical substances. Addiction throws all of this out of balance. That’s why we need replacements and restoration; these are the things we must fix.
Where does this become clear? In the problem statement of addiction. In the case of addiction, science can provide answers to specific questions. Take cancer, for example. You ask, “Will it get better?” Science says, “It depends.” “How long will treatment take?”, “I don’t know.” “Will it improve in the future?”, “I don’t know.” “If we do chemotherapy, will it work?”, “God willing.” “Surgery?”, “God willing.” Everyone says, “God willing, Masha ‘Allah,” because science can’t give a definitive answer.
Now, if someone asks, “Sir, can addiction be treated?” Modern science says, “It depends.” Depends on what? Age, the type of substances used, the amount used. And the length of treatment? That also depends, on so many factors. Whatever you ask, the answer is: “It depends.” Science doesn’t close the question.
If someone asks me, “Sir, does addiction have a definitive cure?” I say, “Yes, it does.” Then they ask, “How long does treatment take?” I say, “Ten months.” They ask, “Does it depend on age?” I say, “No.” “Does it depend on the type of drug?” I say, “No.” “Does it depend on how much they use?” I say, “No.”
They’re surprised. I explain: do you think pregnancy depends on race? On age? Whether someone is white or yellow-skinned? No — every pregnancy lasts about nine months. Minor variations aside, it’s the same for a 40-year-old, a 20-year-old, or a 30-year-old. It might be a little harder or easier in some cases, but essentially, it’s the same.
It’s like planting wheat. Whether you plant a handful or a thousand kilograms, the time it takes to harvest is the same. Whether it’s Brazilian wheat, American wheat, double-roasted wheat, single-roasted wheat — it doesn’t matter. The harvest comes at the same time. Addiction works the same way. It doesn’t matter if someone has been using heroin for forty years or three years — the treatment period is ten months. Heroin, opium, anything — ten months. And if anyone else asks a question, we give them an immediate answer: yes, the treatment length is this, the method is this, the recovery is this. Everything is clearly defined. But who can answer that now?
Now, if you give someone methadone, they ask, “How long do I have to take it?” The usual answer they get is: “It depends.” Even though deep down, they know they’ll have to take it for life, the standard response is always, “It depends.” Or they ask, “How long do I have to take this psychoactive pill?” Again: “It depends. It depends. It depends.”
“I’m going through psychoanalysis. Will I get better?” — “It depends.” This “it depends” has become the so-called scientific answer. It’s not definitive. True science gives a clear, decisive answer. For example: six times six equals what? “Thirty-six.” Not “it depends.”
Now, if someone says, “Six times six equals what?” and the answer is “It depends,” depends on what? Are you here, in Fars, in Turkestan, in Arabia? It doesn’t make sense. Every question must have a precise answer.
“How big is this building?” “Three hundred meters, three hundred forty meters.” “How big is this building?” — “It depends. Depends on what?” Depends on how you measure it — is your measuring tape ninety centimeters, one meter, or eighty centimeters?
So, real science is that which can give precise answers to your questions. If it can, then it’s truly science. If it cannot, it retreats into “it depends” and endless uncertainties.
So, the point is this: whatever we want to do, first we must clearly define the problem, and only then can we take action. For example, someone says, “I want to rent a house.” The first questions are: How much money do you have? How big a space do you need? Which part of the city are you looking at? You have to be specific: “I have five hundred million tomans. I want to rent an eighty-square-meter apartment.” Then, only after clarifying these details, can someone advise you: “Okay, with your budget and space requirements, you could rent in Andisheh Town. But in Sohrevardi? That won’t work. Fereshteh? Not possible.”
The same applies to addiction treatment: we must know exactly what we are looking for. For weight loss, what exactly are we aiming for?
When it comes to weight, we’ve introduced a perspective that is completely different from what most methods and teachings suggest. We say weight gain isn’t entirely about overeating. The main root of the problem is not knowing how to eat properly. Many people eat until they are completely full, with no sense of structure or timing. What we propose is that the body itself should release fat — you are not in control. You don’t control your heart rate; you don’t manage kidney filtration — your liver handles detoxification, your kidneys handle waste. If you tried to do the kidney’s job yourself, you’d need dialysis three times a week.
Weight loss works the same way. You shouldn’t try to lose weight by starving yourself or by overexercising to burn fat. Instead, we need a method that allows the body itself to eliminate fat naturally.
The same principle applies to quitting smoking or overcoming drug addiction. We must find a method that enables the body and mind to do the work. Only then can we achieve real results.
The first step I took was submitting a paper titled “The Problem Statement of Addiction” to the University of Sistan and Baluchestan back in 1998. Fortunately, I was invited to give a lecture there. At that time, I went to explain that the existing methods were flawed. Thirty years ago, I said they were wrong. Today, I am still emphasizing what the correct and proper method is. The reason is simple: other approaches never fully addressed the problem statement.
This principle applies not only to addiction but to anything we want to undertake: first, we must clarify exactly what we want and how we intend to achieve it. If the problem statement is unclear, no one can solve it.
In any case, I am very happy to have been here with you. I sincerely thank each of you for your attention.
A brief note about Friday: I won’t have a session at Taleghani Park, but the park will be open. There won’t be any sports competitions because of the Sacred Defense Week ceremonies. However, the park is available for groups and legions to continue their work. Sports activities will simply not take place.
Now, I hand the session over to the secretary.
Hello friends, I’m Hossein, a traveler.
An important point I want to emphasize is that in all groups, once a session ends, every part of the space must be cleaned and organized in the afternoon. For example, here at the Academy, after today’s session, all the trash bins must be emptied, the kitchenette cleaned, everything washed, tea leaves discarded, and the floor of the hall cleaned. The kitchenette and all areas upstairs—where both women and men meet—must also be tidy and in order. The next group that comes should receive everything in perfect condition. This is true for all centers and all branches: every group must leave the hall clean and hand it over that way.
Now, sometimes we see things like the water heater dripping, or the samovar leaking; perhaps the gas hose is damaged, or tea leaves are still left behind. For instance, trash bins filled with filth, dried residues, chairs blackened from use. In this center, it’s not like that, but in some places it happens. Our female travelers have washed all the chairs several times. Sometimes the men clean, sometimes the companions—everyone takes their turn. Everything should be as neat as a flower bouquet. A leaking samovar should be replaced immediately, even a broken window fixed at once. Any gas leaks, faulty switches, dripping taps, bathrooms, toilets, showers—everything must be checked.
This work has always been done excellently in Congress 60 and must continue to be done that way. All Marzbans )border guards) and Agents are responsible for thoroughly checking and supervising these matters. There are multiple groups: on Tuesdays, female companions have a session upstairs and downstairs. After their session, the entire area must be completely clean. On Tuesday mornings, female travelers have a session; when they leave, everything must again be spotless and handed over beautifully, like a bouquet, to the companions. Companions clean before leaving so that the next group receives everything properly. This is a task we all must follow.
Whose responsibility is this? It falls to the Marzbans. In my opinion, it’s best if each branch assigns the on-duty Marzban to be responsible for this task. The on-duty Marzban must check everything when leaving, both upstairs and downstairs. The upstairs Marzbans must ensure the upper floor is completely clean. Please make sure to include this in your program: in all branches and all centers, everything must be cleaned and washed before leaving, otherwise chaos will occur. Dirt gets left around, things misplaced, and misunderstandings arise. So far, this has been done excellently, and it must continue to be done in the best possible way.
Thank you for listening.
Translated by: Companion Marjan
9/28/2025
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Click here to see the Persian Translation