From: Hank Roth <odin@halcyon.halcyon.com>
Subject: KHAT-cha Journalism
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: The 23:00 News and Mail Service
Date: Wed, 23 Dec 1992 20:49:27 GMT

<<< via P_news/p.news >>>
{From THE VILLAGE VOICE, December 22, 1992}
PRESS CLIPS
[Excerpt]
KHAT-cha Journalism
 
One subject that has received infinitely more airtime than the 
history of U.S. arms proliferation is KHAT, the leafy, appetite-
killing stimulant (also spelled as qat) that is as common in 
Somali society as beer is in America. The mass media, especially 
TV, have portrayed the country as terrorized by drug-crazed 
youthful KHAT-chewers whose addiciton provokes murderous 
paroxysms. The INDEPENDENT'S Dowden last Friday again provided a 
dramatically different view; in a report from Mogadishu on the 
hated plant, he wrote that, "Although some journalists have 
suggested that KHAT explains the violence of the people who have 
torn Somalia to pieces, all Somalis I have spoken to say that 
KHAT does not induce any personality change and never 
aggression...The Somalis' idea of a good night out is to meet in 
the house of a friend, lie on cushions and loor-sofas, drink tea, 
chew KHAT and solve the problems of the world. It is as important 
to Somali society as the pub is to England on a Saturday night. 
Women chew privately--it is supposed to be a male activity. To 
the Americans, however, KHAT is `drugs' and they will have none 
of it. Washington is in Chrusader mode here, and will not permit 
what it sees as drug trafficking."
 
The national print mastodons finally took it up this Monday, and 
one doesn't have to be in the throes of allegedly KHAT-induced 
paranoia to wonder whether Joseph Treaster's NEW YORK TIMES Metro 
section front-pager on KHAT use in the States benefited from more 
than a passing glance at Dowden's story, whose judgements it 
tended to confirm: Treaster summarized what he said were the 
comments of a group of friends resting on cushions on the floor 
of someone's home, sipping tea and talking politics just as many 
East Africans and Yemenis do in their homelands," Sound familiar?
 
Whoever wrote the heads on THE WASHINGTON POST'S page one story 
"A Mouthful of Violence" the same day was clearly more swayed by 
TV's tabloid-style coverage than by the text of Keith Richburg's 
filing from Mogadishu. The inside head, too, referred to the 
"Somalis' Drug of Violence," but Richburg quoted a doctor from 
Mogadishu's Digfer Hospital, himself a sometime masticator, who 
"said studies show that prolonged qat use causes a psychological, 
although not a physical dependence. `You feel like you need 
something, but you're not going to kill your mother if you don't 
get it,' he said," later adding that "it is untrue that Somalia's 
notorious gunmen are all quat-crazed kids, since qat 'does not 
make you crazy, you do not want to kill,'" That the good Somali 
doctor did not suck these views out of a leaf was established by 
a phone call to the Drug Policy Foundation, whose Rob Stewart told 
me that KHAT acts "more like caffeine and nicotine than like 
heroin and cocaine...It's just like chewing tobacco," and is 
hardly more addictive than coffee or cigarettes. Stewart pointed 
out that KHAT's active ingredient, cathine, has "a very low 
addictive ability" even under the draconian standards of the U.S. 
Food and Drug Administration, which places cathine near the 
bottom of the scale in Schedule IV, along with valium and 
prescription diet pills (as compared to Schedule I, which 
conflates as "dangerous" addictive drugs heroin, cocaine...and 
marijuana). And, in all of the self-righteous anti-KHAT stories 
in the U.S. press, not one I've seen has mentioned that, ever 
since Vietnam, huge chunks of the U.S. armed forces have been 
high on one thing or another (see the April 13, 1992, NEW YORK 
POST report in which the Air Force brass defended the use of 
speed by pilots during the Gulf War). Watch for the next wave of 
media madness speculating about the nefarious effects of "KHAT 
addiction" on our uniformed famine-fighters.
[Research: Chrintine Hausman and Matt Fleischer]
---------------------------------------------
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