IN YEMEN, SOME ARE TRYING TO PUSH THIS ANTIDRUG MESSAGE: JUST SAY NO TO QAT

SANAA, Yemen -- Weaning millions of people from a beloved pastime is no
easy task. It's especially tough if the activity in question is a
600-year-old tradition that involves a legal, pleasantly stimulating drug.

But Hamid al-Awadhi is unbowed. A volunteer for a fledgling temperance
group here, he spends most of his free time crusading against what he
perceives as the evils of qat (pronounced "cot"), Yemen's biggest cash crop
and a daily chew for peasants and top government officials alike.

Cueing up the videotape of a lecture he recently gave at a girls' high
school, Mr. Awadhi concedes he wasn't a big hit. "The veils make it hard to
judge the effect of my words," he says. "But our efforts with children have
been positive. It's the adults who are too far gone to reach."

Heckled at School

On the tape, screened at the shared offices that serve as headquarters of
the Society to Combat Qat, Mr. Awadhi comes in for spirited heckling. "If
qat is so bad, why don't they tell us that on television?" one student
asks. Another young woman is particularly pointed: "It's our habit. Why
should we quit?"

Indeed, most people in this country have never even dreamed that the
psychoactive leaves of the common shrub could have a downside. Health
concerns aside, the government says qat is ruining Yemini productivity and
may bring drought to areas of the country where it is grown.

According to a recent Yemeni government report, 90% of adult men use qat
regularly, and almost as many women do. Each day after lunch, traditionally
the Yemenis' biggest meal, almost the entire work force retreats for a
four-hour qat break. With no laws regulating the drug, children often
indulge as well.

Qat, whose scientific name is catha edulis, tastes a little like lawn
clippings and produces a stimulating effect not unlike downing several cups
of coffee. Students routinely chew it while cramming for exams. The drug is
also popular in Somalia and parts of North Africa but is banned in Saudi
Arabia. The U.S. classifies qat (also spelled "khat") as an illegal
substance -- in the same class as heroin, LSD and marijuana.

Typically, Yemenis buy bundles of qat branches or loose leaves in packets
the size of freezer bags. After several hours of pruning and masticating,
that daily supply reduces to a cheek-distending wad approximately the
dimensions of a golf ball. Government studies indicate that, with a daily
portion running $2 or more, qat absorbs half the household income of many
users in this impoverished country.

"We lose millions of worker hours a day to qat," says Abdul-Wassa Saeed,
executive director of Hayel Saeed Anam & Co., a conglomerate with 11,000
employees. Mr. Saeed is one of the anti-qat society's biggest donors and
has banned qat on his factory floors. Alas, his proselytizing falls on deaf
ears in his own boardroom: Mr. Saeed's brother, the company's chairman,
indulges regularly, as does about half of the family-dominated board, Mr.
Saeed says.

Government officials rarely publicly discuss qat's effect on the economy.
One reason: Many of the nation's top politicians also own some of the
largest qat plantations. But in a startling recent announcement, President
Ali Abdulla Saleh forbade government workers from chewing on the job. He
even declared that he was kicking the weed.

"Instead of chewing, I'm taking a computer-training class," the president
said in the anti-qat society's newspaper, Yemen Without Qat. "And I have
been able to persuade many of my friends in government to quit, like the
vice president and the minister of defense."

A Problem with Backsliders

But in the same article, the president says: "Information reaches me that
my friend, the minister of defense, sometimes becomes weak and chews." It
doesn't take much pressing for the president's spokesman, Faris Sanabani,
to admit that the president himself has lapses, albeit "very rarely." And
judging from the stem litter in the stairwells of many public buildings and
the bulging cheeks of soldiers, top officials aren't the only backsliders.

As a result, the task of spreading the just-say-no message is largely left
to the anti-qat society, which numbers just a few dozen. The group, founded
in 1992, was essentially dormant until two years ago, when a couple of
local entrepreneurs and an international health agency financed a modest
national awareness campaign. "The government promises help, but we've
gotten nothing so far," Mr. Awadhi says. "It's not surprising. All of the
politicians chew."

To reach a more receptive audience, the society printed up thousands of
children's coloring books that portray qat-chewing parents as doped-up
dullards. One shows a young boy using the oversize cheek of his qat-chewing
father as a punching bag. "That's our basic strategy: We target kids, and
they go home and criticize their parents," says Ahmed Afif, the society's
chairman.

Cleaning the Spittoons

"For the young kids, I talk about all the toys they would have if their
parents didn't chew qat," says volunteer Mr. Awadhi. For teenage girls, he
invokes more visceral imagery: the country's ubiquitous spittoons, whose
cleaning typically falls to Yemeni wives. "Spit buckets almost always work
with teenage girls," he says.

Still, qat use is so ingrained that the society members sometimes accuse
each other of chewing on the sly. When Mr. Awadhi recently declared he
abstained from the drug completely, an incredulous colleague asked if that
included weekends. "Not even on weekends," asserted Mr. Awadhi, who says he
has been opposed to qat on moral grounds ever since he was young.

Yemeni government statistics show that both qat production and consumption
are on the upswing, as farmers abandon other crops for the tall-growing
shrub with the scrawny leaves. In 1999, the country's qat harvest dwarfed
that of all fruits combined. Mohammed Anus, a villager in the north Yemen
village of Dar al Hagar, has turned most of his family's plantation over to
qat shrubs, leaving to ruin the peach trees his grandfather planted. "Why
pick fruit, when I can get 10 times as much for qat?" he asks.

But qat is a thirsty plant, sucking up nearly 80% of the water supply in
parts of this parched country, according to government statistics. The
dusty roads of Dar al Hagar are crisscrossed with galvanized pipes and
flanked by mud canals that carry water to qat plantations.

Still, like many Yemenis, Mr. Anus considers a daily chew part of a sound
health regimen. "My friend's father gave up chewing once," he says. "His
face swelled up and he got very sick."