Drug agents need not make a big deal over khat, Yemenis say

NEW YORK -- In a tiny Brooklyn cafe with faded tourist posters of Yemen in the window, the mood at a table of Arab men darkens when the topic turns to khat.

"In my country, khat is easy," says Abdul Rahman. "Everybody, the president, they have it. . . . I don't understand this."

Rahman, a 26-year-old Yemeni, was working at the cafe on the Islamic holiday Eid al-Adha when narcotics officers walked in and busted three men in the basement on drug charges.

Raids at the Blue Province Restaurant and two other Yemeni businesses last month had nothing to do with cocaine, designer drugs or even marijuana. Instead, the target was people selling khat, a stimulating leaf that many in the Middle East chew like tobacco and consider no more sinister than a double espresso.

Rahman and other Arab immigrants in Brooklyn say that before the raids, they had no idea khat (pronounced "cot") was illegal here.

"The community has been consuming khat for a long time -- this is not a secret," said Ali Sharaf, a member of a Yemen American student group. "I'm surprised that now it's a big thing."

Back home in Yemen, khat chewing is commonplace, often a daily practice. It's the same in Djibouti and Somalia on the Horn of Africa.

U.S. authorities got interested when khat appeared more and more in Arab communities around the country.

"This is a serious problem," said New York City police spokesman Sgt. Andrew McInnis. "We responded to complaints about the negative impact on the community."

Authorities allege the suspects arrested in the raids were breaking laws banning possession of cathonine -- the key ingredient in freshly cut khat leaves, which look like basil. The federal government lists cathonine as a "Schedule I" controlled substance, the same category as heroin, LSD and ecstasy.

Khat chewers say it gives them energy and a feeling of euphoria.

But the Drug Enforcement Administration maintains that khat is psychologically addictive.

Compulsive use, the DEA says, "may result in manic behavior with grandiose delusions or in a paranoid type of illness, sometimes accompanied by hallucinations."

Khat is believed to have been traded as a commodity even before coffee. Its use originated in Ethiopia, then spread through east Africa and parts of the Middle East. Muslim legend has it that its stimulant effect enabled all-night prayer vigils.

But now some people in Yemen are worried that too many government workers were wasting away their afternoons -- and their income -- chewing khat. President Ali Abdullah Saleh has tried to set an example by announcing he will only chew on weekends.

The United Nations estimates that in Djibouti, 98 percent of the men use khat to numb the pain of poverty. Somalian warlords dole it out to soldiers as part of daily rations.

In the United States, the market for khat appears to be limited and nonviolent. Customs officers confiscated 49,000 pounds of khat in fiscal 1999, compared with 1.2 million pounds of marijuana.

Most of the khat was seized at the New York-area airports. Agents who caught a whiff of the plant's pungent smell during random inspections last year found a total of 30,500 pounds stashed in luggage, mainly in amounts so small the couriers weren't prosecuted.

Seizures also have been made at Denver's airport, on the New Jersey Turnpike and in Minneapolis. In San Jose, Calif., a Yemeni man was arrested in 1998 for growing 1,000 plants.

Still, khat "is probably not one of our priorities," said New York DEA spokesman Stan Skowronski.

Police began the Brooklyn investigation about six months ago after learning that street dealers were peddling khat around Arab storefronts. The going price was $40 for a day's supply.

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