STIMULANT THRIVES IN DROUGHT-RIDDEN ETHIOPIA

DRUGS: Qat, A Shrub Whose Leaves Give A Mild High If Chewed, Continues To
Be A Cash Crop.

CHELENKO, Ethiopia - The hills around Aliyi Saido's fields are scorched the
color of sunburned skin.

For three years the crucial spring rains, soft showers called the belg,
have failed. The village's corn crop is burning up under a molten-white
sun. Alarmed United Nations officials, warning of another major
humanitarian catastrophe in the region should the skies remain cloudless,
are doling out emergency food to some 290,000 hungry farmers in the
surrounding hills.

But old Aliyi, who claims to be 100, isn't worried. He is happily growing
qat. Even more happily, he is chewing it.

"God created qat, and He created us to use it," the white-bearded farmer
said, lying stupefied in the sparse shade of a thorn tree, his cheeks
bulging with gummy wads of leaves from the narcotic shrub Catha edulis.

"Qat likes dryness," he said, blinking compulsively and waving a gnarled
hand at his small but lash drug plot. "God has stopped the rain. We
cannot grow food. So we must grow qat instead. It is his will."

Divine intervention or not, qat, the stimulant of choice for impoverished
millions in Africa's Horn and the Arabian peninsula, appears not only to be
holding its own but actually thriving amid Ethiopia's brutal drought.

According to chagrined government officials, more and more of Ethiopia's
eastern highlands are being cultivated with the notorious shrub, thanks
largely to its natural drought resistance and a high selling price compared
to other cash crops.

Every day at dawn, dozens of battered, leaf-laden trucks and taxis rocket
down the windy mountain roads here, rushing to fill the cravings of a qat
network that stretches from Ethiopia to Yemen, Djibouti, Somalia and even
African and Middle Eastern expatriate communities in faraway Europe and the
United States.

Qat (pronounced Chat) is a booming business by Ethiopian standards. Bundles
of the green, bitter leaves, which when chewed trigger a mild high, sell
for as much as $6 a pound in Ethiopian markets - five times the price of
coffee, another popular cash crop.

In the town of Dire Dawa, about a two-hour's drive from farmer Aliyi's
remote fields, tens of thousands of dollars worth of fresh-cut are loaded
daily onto waiting prop planes for express delivery to clients abroad. The
aircraft roar over a parched landscape dotted with villages that are kept
alive, just barely, by grain donations from the U.N.

"The qat planes have never stopped flying, even during the worst of this
spring's famine," said Roberta Rossi, a spokeswoman for the UN World Food
Program in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital.

In truth, a growing public dependence on the alkaloids locked away in the
spindly, tea-like shrub has alarmed both producer and consumer nations of
qat - and not just because the lucrative trappings of the drug trade jar
against a miserable backdrop of hunger and drought in one of the poorest
regions on the globe.

Qat has been used since antiquity in Africa's Horn and the Middle East.
Masticated in wads the size of a golf ball, the tender shoots of the plant
release cathine and cathinone, weak cocaine-like substances that make the
user talkative and giddy.

The drug, consumed in long, gabby chewing sessions by groups of men, was
once a luxury reserved for spiritual leaders and village elders. But today,
with the breakdown of ancient social structures and the chaos of recurring
wars, millions of younger users - mainly men - have become hooked on the
leaves.

In Somalia, warlords buy their soldiers' loyalty in part with payments in
qat. The drug is considered so valuable that Somali truckers brave bandits
to shuttle half-ton loads of the plant across the borders of Ethiopia,
where the best qat is harvested at least twice a year.

The world's biggest addict, however, is just across the Red Sea in Yemen,
which both grows and imports the plants.

According to recent studies, as much as a third of the average Yemeni's
disposable income is spent on qat. Yemen's bureaucracy essentially shuts
down after lunchtime, as thousands of male workers leave their offices for
hours-long chat sessions with friends, paralyzing government. Last year,
President Ali Abdallah Salih's announcement that he was giving up qat and
taking up exercise and computers as hobbies was greeted with incredulity.

Perhaps nowhere is the impact of the qat industry stranger than in
drought-haunted Ethiopia, where millions of dollars worth of the drug is
grown and shipped with an efficiency unseen elsewhere in that country.

This year, even as the world's largest conventional war raged with
neighboring Eritrea and international television crews descended on the
country to tape wrenching scenes of starving herders, Ethiopia's qat
pipeline never hiccuped, much less dried up.