The social practice of opium use has existed in Iran for centuries. Sediqeh Dowlatabadi, an Iranian woman writer during the modern period, left behind a detailed record of the effects of opium use on women. This paper seeks to contextualize her information on women’s opium use in the larger historical narrative of Iranian consumption patterns of the mid-twentieth century thereby highlighting a forgotten episteme of history. Furthermore, the paper examines how Iranian women’s drug usage compares and contrasts with women in Afghanistan. Sediqeh Dowlatabadi was the first licensed female newspaper editor in Isfahan. In the third incarnation of her controversial journal, Zaban-e Zanan, (c.1944-1945) she gave a detailed explanation of the effects of opium. Her description included a clear picture about the negative effects of the drug including changes to the color of the skin, excessive sweating, etc. She focused specifically on its effects on female users. In her August 1944 article, “Morphine and Opium,” she explained that morphine use decreased the amount women lactated. In this article she championed the nation’s health by widely disseminating knowledge about addiction and its effects. Throughout the course of her civic career, women’s health was one of her main foci. Dowlatabadi also studied opium addiction in babies and its effect on their health and nutrition. As late as the 1940s, Dowlatabadi documented women quieting upset babies by administering opium, starting a negative cycle in society: from childhood, these children were indoctrinated in the drug culture of the country. Utilizing Dowlatabadi’s records, now stored in the International Institute of Social History, this paper reincorporates gender into the discussion of drug use in Iran during the mid-twentieth century. This paper benefits from such works as Rudi Matthee’s The Pursuit of Pleasure which explores social practices surrounding ingestion of opium and other drugs in early modern Iran. Another source which this paper relies on is Fariba Nawa’s Opium Nation, which examines the effect of the Afghani drug trade on women. Furthermore, gaining knowledge of Iranian women’s drug use in the mid-twentieth century contributes to the current discussion of women’s drug use of opium and other illicit substances complimenting such works as Siavash Jafari’s “Socio-Cultural Factors Associated with the Initiation of Opium Use in Darab, Iran.”