Assessment of khat (Catha edulis Forsk) 1. Substance Identification

F. WHO Review History: The WHO Expert Committee on Drug Dependence (ECDD) and other UN bodies reviewed khat at earlier occasions. The Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs of the League of Nations discussed on the subject in 1933, but no action was taken. On request of the Commission on Narcotics Drugs (CND), the Expert Committee on Addiction-Producing Drugs (as the ECDD was named at the time) reported in its 12th report (1962) that clarification on the chemical and pharmacological identification of the active principles of khat was needed before a sound medical appraisal of the chronic use of khat could be made [1]. No referral was made to a study on the effects. In its 13th report (1964) the committee studied a report by the Secretariat on the medical aspects of the habitual chewing of khat leaves. It concluded "that the problems connected with khat and with the amphetamines should be considered in the same light because of the similarity of their medical effects, even though there are quantitative differences and specific socio-economic features; this is all the more desirable since the problems with respect to khat are confined at present to a few countries in one region" [2]. In 1971 CND recommended again to ECOSOC to ask WHO to review khat, and requested that the UN Narcotics Laboratory should undertake research on the chemistry of khat and its components. These studies were reported in a series of internal UN documents from 1974 through 1978 [3]. In 1978 an Expert group financed by the UN Fund for Drug Abuse Control convened to consider the botany and chemistry of khat [4]. However, in the reports of ECDD no review of khat could be found after 1971. In 1983 an international conference on khat took place in Madagascar [5]. In 2002 the 33rd ECDD pre-reviewed khat and concluded that there was sufficient information on khat to justify a critical review [6].