POLICE IN U.S. CRACK DOWN ON POPULAR DRUG FROM YEMEN

NEW YORK - In a tiny Brooklyn cafe with faded tourist posters of Yemen
in the window, the mood at a table of Arab men darkens when the
topic turns to khat.

"In my country, khat is easy," says Abdul Rahman. "Everybody, the
president, they have it. . . . I don't understand this."

Rahman, 26, a Yemeni, was working at the cafe on the Islamic holiday
Eid al-Adha when narcotics officers walked in and arrested three
men in the basement on drug charges.

Raids at the Blue Province Restaurant and two other Yemeni businesses
last month had nothing to do with cocaine, designer drugs or even
marijuana. Instead, the target was people selling khat, a stimulating
leaf that many people in the Middle East chew like tobacco and
consider no more sinister than a double espresso.

Rahman and other Arab immigrants in Brooklyn say that before the raids
they had no idea khat (pronounced cot) was illegal here.

"The community has been consuming khat for a long time - this is not a
secret," said Ali Sharaf, a member of a Yemen-American student group.
"I'm surprised that now it's a big thing."

Back home in Yemen, khat chewing is commonplace, often a daily
practice. It's the same in Djibouti and Somalia on the Horn of Africa.

U.S. authorities got interested when khat began appearing more and
more in Arab communities around the country.

"This is a serious problem," said New York City police Sgt. Andrew
McInnis. "We responded to complaints about the negative impact
on the community."

Authorities allege the suspects arrested in the raids were breaking
laws banning possession of cathonine - the key ingredient in khat. The
federal government lists cathonine as a "Schedule I" controlled
substance, the same category as heroin, LSD and Ecstasy.

Khat chewers say the leaf gives them energy and a feeling of
euphoria.

The Drug Enforcement Administration says khat is psychologically
addictive. Compulsive use, the DEA says, "may result in manic behavior
with grandiose delusions or in a paranoid type of illness, sometimes
accompanied by hallucinations."

Some people in Yemen are worried that too many government workers are
wasting their afternoons - and their income - chewing khat. President
Ali Abdullah Saleh has tried to set an example by announcing he will
chew only on weekends.

In the United States, the market for khat appears to be limited and
nonviolent. Customs officers confiscated 49,000 pounds of khat in
fiscal 1999, compared with 1.2 million pounds of marijuana.

Most of the khat was seized at the New York area airports. Agents who
caught a whiff of the plant's pungent smell during random
inspections last year found a total of 30,500 pounds stashed in
luggage, mainly in amounts so small the couriers weren't prosecuted.

Seizures also have been made at Denver's airport, on the New Jersey
Turnpike and in Minneapolis. In San Jose, Calif., a Yemeni man was
arrested in 1998 for growing 1,000 plants in what was described as the
first khat plantation in the United States.