Khat Special Edition Introduction

Abstract

Although khat (Catha edulis) is not widely known outside its countries of production in East Africa and Yemen, it evokes strong views among consumers, development workers, and government officials who often behave as self-styled experts on the drug. Yet, the evidence of harm to health is scant. As khat consumption has spread to five continents it is perceived as being “exotic” and “alien” and to be a major cause of poverty and underdevelopment. However, it is argued here that khat is being used as a scapegoat for a wide range of social and economic ills across the world.

Keywords:

• Khat
• social policy
• East Africa
• Yemen
• Somalis
• diaspora
• khat cultivation
• khat consumption
• khat distribution

Notes

Notes

* Sir Bradford Hill published the nine criteria in 1965 to help assist researchers and clinicians determine whether risk factors were causes of a particular disease or outcome or merely associated. The nine criteria include: strength of association, consistency between studies, temporality, biological gradient, biological plausibility, coherence, specificity, experimental evidence, and analogy. (“The Environment and Disease: Associations or Causation?” by A. B. Hill, 1965, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 58, pp. 295–300). Additional criteria have been added in the literature. The reader is reminded that with the advent of artificial science and its theoretical underpinnings (chaos, complexity, and uncertainty theories) it is now posited that much of human behavior is complex, dynamic, multidimensional, level/phase structured, nonlinear, law driven, and bounded (culture, time, place, age, gender, ethnicity, etc.). Khat consumption, and its posited as well as actual “consequences,” however how ever they are defined, would be such a behavior/process. Traditional linear cause-and-effect relationships can be and are misleading. Editor's note.

^† The reader is reminded that terms such as addiction, dependency (physical, psychological, etc.), habit, while being used nosologically, are loaded, stigmatized, culturally embedded descriptions of actual as well as posited complex, dynamic processes that continue to be misused by a range of individual and systemic stakeholders. It is useful to remember that many decades have past since the general semanticists taught us that map = = the territory and that the “word” = = the “object.” Editor's note.

¹ A similar description has been told about the “discovery” of the coffee bean in the Middle East.