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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 August 2000 Issue No. 494 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 August 2000 Issue No. 494
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Books Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons A two-way road
By Salama Ahmed Salama
I was not particularly surprised when I read in the papers that quat, the drug widely used in Yemen, Somalia and across the Horn of Africa, has finally reached the United States. Nor was I surprised to learn that it has become very popular with school children and college students -- to the point where the American authorities, who consider it as much a classified drug as cocaine or heroin, are treating it as a major social problem.
The arrival of quat in the US resembles the arrival of bango (an Egyptian-Arabic corruption of the Indian word bhang) in Egypt. The drug culture is merely following the route of other cultural conquests -- refusing to be hindered by any barrier or obstacle.
The implication is that the phenomenon of globalisation will not rest content with removing trade obstacles and opening up markets to ever more commodities, ever more competition. Cultural, intellectual and artistic influences are already flooding from dominant to weaker cultures. But globalisation is a two-way road, and evils, crimes, diseases and drugs, in turn, are finding their way from poorer to richer states, from marginal to dominant regions and peoples. The latter, it must be added, are armed with science and technology to boot.
I have read that bango, a plant like molokhiya, was not known in Egypt until a few years ago, and that it arrived here from the Sudan and the desert regions in the heart of Africa, in the camel caravans that regularly cross the Egyptian borders. It is a plant that was used to sedate camels, helping them cover long distances. Then the camel traders themselves began to use it to ameliorate their long journeys, bringing it with them to Egypt where it began to be grown in many desert regions, hidden from the eyes of the police. It found a ready market, not least because it was comparatively cheap. It was not long before the drug was on its way to Europe.
And if Afghanistan has, up until now, managed to brace itself against the cultural and civilisational influences coming from outside -- implementing, under the rule of the Taliban, a strict system, forbidding the use of satellite television and imposing rigid restrictions on women's education and their participation in public life, placing the entire society in a rigidly medieval framework -- it has nonetheless managed to engineer one of the strangest exchanges in history: importing modern arms from the West in exchange for exporting class A drugs.
It is well-known that the most vital drug-dealing arrangements of the present time are those that operate from Afghanistan to Europe. They are challenged in their prominence only by the activities of Latin American traders -- a region that has already given itself over to free trade and globalisation -- and their American partners.
Some analysts have pointed to the brutality of globalisation, which results in the weakening and marginalisation of the economies of developing countries. Such a system, they indicate, inevitably leads to side effects of this kind, working to disrupt the stability of developing societies, where crime and drug dealing increasingly predominate.
In fact, the ability of powerful countries to control the inflow of drugs inevitably gives way, and more often sooner than later, regardless of the quantity or quality of preventative measures. Thus the advanced countries may well pay the price for leaving the developing countries behind. It is, then, only to be expected that quat, AIDS and other evils should have found it so easy to infiltrate rich societies.
