“No one in the world would desire to introduce the khat habit into civilized communities, where there are too many similar habits already”
American Consul in Aden Charles Moser
(Varisco, 2004: 115)

Yemen is endowed with energy, but unlike its regional neighbors blessed/cursed by ‘Black Gold,’ two major cash crops stimulate Yemen and its people. The first is coffee, a vital export commodity for an underdeveloped nation of nearly 18 million people ranked 153 out of 177 in the United Nations’ Human Development Index. The second is qat, which has the same ecological demands as coffee (Wenner, 1967), but dominates agriculture in Yemen to the point where the country is becoming ‘less and less able to feed itself’ (Held, 2007: 434). A mild stimulant, ‘closer to coffee than to opium’ (Varisco: 102) qat, is seen by some as an iniquitous drug that places tourniquet-like pressure on vital resources and causes chronic morbidity while for others qat is ‘a flower of paradise’ (Anderson, 1987).

A common joke in Yemen goes like this-when the government had had enough of qat and its deleterious effect on Yemeni society, it decided to ban its use. Because of the vital role qat serves in Yemen, a creative plan was essential for success. The government decided that such an innovative idea could only come about during a qat chewing session.

So ubiquitous is qat in any discussion of Yemeni culture yet so little is qat understood beyond Sana’a or Aden and within the growing Diaspora in the United States. Qat (Catha edulis) is both the taproot of Yemeni society and a contributing factor to the social and economic decadence that has made Yemen the poorest nation in the Arab world. Once serving a medicinal role in the Islamic world and China, the tender leaves and stem of the small tree/scrub are widely chewed as a mild narcotic, chiefly because its principal active components cathinone and cathine induce physiological effects similar to the stimulation of the ‘sympathetic nervous system’ (Cox & Hagen, 2003). In an increasingly transnational world, more and more Yemeni call the Puget Sound home and like other immigrant groups, holds on to their traditions and customs. Yemenis (and Somalis, Ethiopians and Kenyans) surreptitiously consume qat and are unfazed by attempts by the federal government to reign in on the market.

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