An unruly backwater tries going straight

[Ali Abdullah Saleh] governs a poor, mountainous country of 18 million where many adults squander much of the day in the national pastime of chewing a mildly narcotic leaf called kat. According to a recent local study, a typical Yemeni laborer spends three times as much on kat as on food. Saleh would like to make the country more economically productive, but investors are leery of Yemen's frontier culture.