NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/9578

Text File | 1992-12-23 | 5.2 KB | 104 lines

Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive
Path: sparky!uunet!wupost!mont!pencil.cs.missouri.edu!rich
From: Hank Roth <[e-mail]>
Subject: KHAT-cha Journalism
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Date: Wed, 23 Dec 1992 20:49:27 GMT
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{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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