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Yemen: A Nation Hooked on Chewing
Yemen is under influence of qat
By Samson Mulugeta
STAFF WRITER
September 30, 2001
Sanaa, Yemen – Amid the cacophony of blaring horns and screeching brakes, a taxi driver zigzagged his way to a fare and slid the passenger-side door open. As the taxi eased back into traffic, the driver, his right cheek bulging with qat, plucked a few leaves from a plastic bag between his legs and offered the national narcotic to his passenger, who accepted.
It was noon, and in another hour the bustling streets of this 2,000-year-old city would become deserted as nearly everyone in the country, from government ministers to shoeshine boys to businessmen, slowly got stoned.
The commerce in qat (pronounced “cot”) – a leaf grown on evergreen bushes in Yemen and nearby Arab and African countries – accounts for a third of this country’s gross national product. Three out of four Yemeni adults are estimated to chew the leaf, which has even been depicted in the country’s currency.
The rituals of qat are woven into the fabric of Yemeni society. Despite the patina of Westernization here, the country is deeply resistant to foreign influences. Even in this relatively modern capital, most men wear not pants but the traditional jambiya, a scarf-like sheet wrapped around the waist. They sport daggers strapped to their sides and tennis ball-sized wads of qat in their cheeks.
Shortly after lunch, men and women retire, separately, to dimly lit rooms lined with mats and cushions to chew their way to a mild high. It takes hours of chewing to feel the drug’s buzz, but the euphoria lasts all afternoon and night. Chewers say they feel more alert, sociable and able to communicate, and they have less need of food and sleep. Medical researchers appear unimpressed, suggesting that, as with other stimulants, such perceptions are an illusion.
Civil servants send their messengers to buy qat, “the green Imam,” in the words of one prominent Yemeni writer, “who rules our republic.” Travelers outside the city stop by the roadside to pick through bundles of leaves for sale. If people have to work, they take the qat with them and share it with colleagues.
At qat sessions, people chew, swallow the juice and accumulate wads of compacted leaf in their cheeks. They also debate the events of the day, seal business deals and network. Not to chew qat in Yemen is to be a social outcast. Increasingly, even children munch on qat after school.
This ancient land, source of the biblical frankincense and myrrh, is falling increasingly into the grip of qat. For 700 years after it was first imported from Ethiopia, qat was consumed near where it was grown because it loses its potency within two days of being picked. In recent decades, improved roads and transportation are spreading qat throughout Yemen.
As some in America debate de-criminalizing drugs, some Yemenis say they are unhappy with the effects on this country of a legal narcotic. Walid Abdulaziz Al-Saqqaf, editor in chief of the Yemen Times, an English-language weekly, has led a so-far unsuccessful crusade to lessen his country’s dependency on qat.
“It’s consuming the budget of the family, consuming 40 percent of our water supply to cultivate it,” Al-Saqqaf said. “But the worse things become economically in this country, the more people chew qat. Perhaps it is to forget their problems.”
Medical professionals have found that qat, like other stimulants, can cause paranoia, depression and dependence.
Because qat is legal and, reportedly, because powerful Mafia-like groups control its cultivation and distribution, the commerce does not cause the kind of violence associated with the drug trade in the United States in recent decades.
Still, the working hours lost to qat are incalculable as a good portion of the country’s work force takes off five to six hours daily to buy and chew it.
Yemenis who chew qat insist it’s a productive activity. Tawfik Mohammed, 24, a student, said he chews when he has to study long hours. “I feel energetic when I chew qat,” he said. “When I am on a school holiday, I don’t chew.”
Fuad Hassan, 22, a construction worker, said he chews qat to keep alert at work. “I work long hours to support my family, and the qat keeps me going,” Hassan said.
Many Western visitors to Yemen through the years have despised qat, hating the half-bitter taste it leaves and missing the point of a mild high that takes nearly half a day to arrive. Kevin Rushby, though, an Englishman, came to appreciate the leaf’s role in Yemeni life while traveling through the country. Qat gave him, he offered, “a love for the country more powerful than my own.”
“Here was a leaf that in Yemen has a pivotal role in poetry, music, architecture, family relationships and funerary rites, home furnishings, clothes, what people eat, when restaurants open and close, where roads go to and where not, who owns a car and who does not, office hours, television schedules, even whether couples have sex and how long it lasts,” Rushby wrote in “Eating the Flowers of Paradise: A Journey Through the Drug Fields of Ethiopia and Yemen.”
Abdul-Karim Al-Razihi, a widely-known Yemeni writer, reflected in 1993: “Qat … is the opium of our people. It is the green Imam who rules over our republic. It is the key for everything and it is central to all our social occasions. It is the unexplainable that explains everything.”
In 1999, President Ali Abdullah Saleh announced that he was giving up chewing qat and taking up exercising and putting his time to better use by working on his computer. Most Yemenis wished him luck – and went right on chewing.
Copyright © 2002, Newsday, Inc.
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