Friday October 28, 2016
The last laugh
“ASK any Somali mother who Theresa May is, and she will say, ‘Bless her, that’s the woman who saved my family’,” declares Abukar Awale, a Somali activist in London. His enthusiasm is explained by the government’s ban in 2014 of qat, a leafy plant which is a mild psychoactive stimulant chewed in Britain mostly by Somalis.
Attempts to outlaw the stuff had failed previously because experts were unconvinced it was sufficiently harmful. Those experts remained unconvinced. Both the government’s advisory council on drugs and a parliamentary committee cautioned against the ban. But Mrs May, then home secretary, was concerned that Britain risked turning into a distribution hub since the drug had been banned elsewhere, worried about the intoxicant’s harmful effects and convinced that the mafrishes where men went to chew were breeding radicalism. The ban went ahead.
Many Somalis cheered. “She felt our pain,” says Mr Awale, a self-described ex-addict and prominent anti-qat campaigner. He claims that many of those who once idled their days away in qat dens are now hard at work. Khadijah Shireh, the director of British Somali Community, a charity led by women in north London, believes that men who once stayed up all night chewing the plant are now spending more time with their families.
Government statistics offer some support for such claims. According to the Crime Survey of England and Wales, just 0.06% of 16- to 59-year-olds said they had used qat in 2015, compared with 0.2% who said the same in 2011. The Metropolitan Police say that domestic-abuse reports involving Somalis, Eritreans or Kenyans—all qat enthusiasts—dropped by 23% in the year after the ban was introduced (though the numbers are small). And prices in Kenya, where much of the drug is grown, have dropped as exports to Britain have fallen, says Neil Carrier of the African Studies Centre at Oxford University.
The government has been busy banning other drugs, too. As part of the Psychoactive Substances Act, which came into force in May, a slew of “legal highs” are now outlawed. The biggest impact has been on nitrous oxide (more commonly known as laughing gas), says Fiona Measham, a criminologist at the University of Durham. It has not been banned outright, because of its many legitimate uses: in dentistry, for example, and in cans of whipped cream. Possession is still legal but selling it to those planning to get high is not. The impact can already be seen at festivals, a popular spot for the drug. The steady hiss of balloons being filled with nitrous oxide was notably diminished at the Glastonbury music festival this year, says Professor Measham.
But prohibitionists should be wary of drawing too many lessons from these two unusual drugs. Neither is particularly addictive, so consumers should find it relatively easy to go without. Qat should ideally be consumed within 48 hours of being picked, so smuggling, which may involve delays, is trickier than for other drugs. And the distinctive bundles of the plant, wrapped in banana leaves, are easily recognised by customs officials.
Imports of dried qat, which lasts longer, have risen, says Mr Carrier, but it is less potent and more expensive: £20-30 ($24-37) a bag compared with the £3 that an equivalent bundle of the fresh kind cost before the ban. Somalis are among the poorest in Britain, so price hikes may be particularly offputting. And qat’s bulk means that almost any other drug would be more profitable to smuggle. Nitrous oxide, meanwhile, is an “icing-on-the-cake” drug, says Professor Measham, often taken alongside other drugs. Few are so devoted to it that they would dive into the black market.
Qat, used largely by a small, marginalised group, is also a useful drug for sending political signals, namely that the government is tough on drugs. That has worked. Banning nitrous oxide was a way of getting rid of “head shops” that sold it and other legal highs openly on high streets. That, too, has been a success. But those selling laughing gas at festivals now are far more likely to have links to organised crime. And the government’s failure so far to assess the impact of either ban (analysis of qat’s prohibition to date consists of a single parliamentary question) makes it hard to know whether people are moving on to more dangerous habits. Evidence from the Netherlands, where qat was banned in 2013, suggests that some users shifted to alcohol, legal but more harmful.
Even those Somalis who support the qat ban say the government has failed to do much to support former users. The decline of qat cafés means Somalis have lost one of their few secular social spaces. Some harms are hard to measure.