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Once healthy, abstemious Shah Reza considered outlawing opium smoking, but factors other than reform weighed heavily. Important was the fact that an estimated half of the adult population smokes opium, that it is used as solace for the famine victim, to quiet crying babies and pleading children, to deaden the pain of a disease-ridden population largely unserved by doctors or hospitals, as well as for sheer pleasure. More important was that the opium trade, transported by camel caravan into Russia, then carried over the Tran-siberian Railroad to China by the obliging Soviets, accounted for more than half of Iran's exports (excluding oil revenues, used exclusively for the army), bringing the King of Kings needed foreign money.
Receipts and Expenditures-Money was needed to make Teheran a city worthy of the residence of the "Most Lofty of Living Men." His Imperial Majesty must have expensive macadam roads for his occasional visits to the summer palace on the Caspian Sea—a palace convertible into a summer hotel for commoners when the royal master is not in residence.
More expensive than all other modern improvements put together, however, scheduled to cost $160,000,000, nearly three times the annual revenue of Iran, is an 865-mile railroad line. No foreign country is to own any part of this line, no foreign loans are to be accepted. Conceived as a strategic railway, to enable the Iranians to repulse possible British invasion from the Persian Gulf, Russian invasion from the Turkomen Soviet Socialist Republic, the railroad line carefully avoids all Iran's big cities except Teheran, skirts round the Empire's more fertile districts, spans wide rivers, crosses mountain passes as high as 7,200 feet, bores into numerous tunnels, connects with no foreign lines. Foreign engineers, not interested in strategy, chuckled that the railway goes from "nowhere to nowhere." This spring Scandinavian engineers were doubling shifts to finish before autumn a 200-mile gap so that His Imperial Majesty can soon ride by rail from his estates on the Caspian to his lands on the Persian Gulf.
The first few hundred miles of the King of Kings' expensive railroad toy was paid for by a heavy tax on tea, favorite Iranian beverage. When this tax failed to produce sufficient money, large portions of Iran's silver reserve were sold. The Iranian rial lost more than half its value (worth about 6½¢ today), necessitating creation of Government monopolies for imports and exports, prohibition of entry or departure of Iran's paper or silver money. Food prices doubled, taxes trebled. To meet clearing agreement promises, large stores of grain, rice, dried fruits, some needed for home consumption, were exported. In one area His Imperial Majesty decreed that cotton should be grown instead of wheat. Drought ensued, the cotton crop failed, and to make matters worse the world's cotton market just then fell. To the Iranian masses this meant extreme privation, to foreign visitors scenes in Iran's villages were shocking.