Marijuana Downgrade: Three cheers for Yemen

What do backward Yemen and the developed United States have in common?  An apparently insatiable urge to get stoned on a green bush.  In Yemen the green bush, khat, generally is chewed.  In our country the green bush, marijuana, is smoked, chewed, vaped, and applied as a cream.  The effect is more or less the same:  incapacity and degradation.

Imagine being a fly on the wall at the recent Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) senior staff meeting where Biden politicals hanging on at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) uncorked their plan to downgrade marijuana on the controlled substances list.  You remember HHS:  the same public health agency that provided gold-plated COVID-19 advice to the nation while receiving Big Pharma royalties.  Does Big Marijuana pay royalties?  Bet on it.

One wonders:  in the meeting room, is there a portrait of late DEA Special Agent Enrique Camarena?  Did anyone mention that the Guadalajara Cartel murdered Camarena in 1982 for engineering the destruction of its marijuana plantations?  Or that transfers of millions of American dollars each year collected from American drug buyers finance the cartels?  Has anyone at DEA or HHS disputed the notion that increasing marijuana use in the United States will contribute to reducing our shocking national drug addiction?  Or that the cartels will vanish?

In Yemen khat is widely available and khat chewing is built into everyday life.  Visit Yemen’s ancient capital, Sanaa, and you will see khat-chewing parlors on every block.  Couches line the walls in these establishments.  By mid-afternoon they are occupied by out-of-it chewers and the country shuts down.  Visit Sanaa’s central market and you will see heaps of the green khat bush on tables, ready for local use and for export to the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Gulf states, and even to the United States, where khat is illegal.  For now, anyway.

Like marijuana, khat is on the U.S. list of dangerous controlled substances.  In Yemen, however, khat users are in no danger of criminal prosecution.  In fact, khat is so tightly woven into Yemeni culture that the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa has a khat-chewing room for embassy political officers meeting with their Yemeni contacts.

What has khat meant for Yemen?  According to the CIA Factbook, three leading khat-using countries are in the top 25 nations for infant mortality:  Yemen, and its near neighbors across the Red Sea, Djibouti and Somalia.  The Factbook explains that the “infant mortality rate compares the number of deaths of infants under one year old in a given year per 1,000 live births in the same year. This rate is often used as an indicator of the level of health in a country.”

On infant mortality, Yemen and Djibouti are neck-in-neck with a death rate in the mid-40s, compared with Somalia and its staggering rate of 83 infant deaths per 1,000.  For the United States, CIA’s 2024 estimate for infant mortality is 5 deaths per 1,000.  Yemen and Somalia also compete for the highest illiteracy rates in the world, although Yemen is the Arab world’s winner by far.

Yemen is a basket case on many demographic fronts, and there are many reasons: war, terrorism (Yemen is Osama bin Laden’s homeland), Iranian intervention, and other ills.  Reviewing the literature on Yemen infant mortality and literacy, however, it is hard to find even a passing mention of the elephant in the room:  Yemen’s khat culture.

Could wider marijuana use affect our national culture?  It already has, and the clinical effects of cannabis abuse are well laid out in the American Psychiatric Association’s  Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR).  As the final wraps come off marijuana, this drug’s place in the public policy firmament will shift from criminal possession or distribution to damage done by impaired users to our nation’s highways, workplaces, schools, and homes.  According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, for instance, in 2023 there were 41,000 traffic deaths across America.  With easier access to marijuana, expect this to increase.

The impact of marijuana as a gateway to more dangerous drugs has always been difficult to calculate, but it will increase, too.  Next, expect the khat diaspora in America from Yemen and Somalia to follow suit and demand downgrade of khat on the controlled substances schedule.

As the late Charles Krauthammer observed in his 2009 Wriston Lecture to the Manhattan Institute, decline is a choice.  On marijuana, apparently the Biden administration has chosen.  Without immediate pushback, our nation will catch up soon to Yemen’s cultural plunge.

From 2006 to 2009 the author was U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Counternarcotics in the Pentagon.

Image: Public domain.