Khat is a good deal stupider as drug-of-choice in Yemen than alcohol would be. It's a crop that takes up tons of the scarce arable land and even more scarce water in a very poor country in which 17% of income is spent on khat.
More stupid? Alcohol kills 16,000 people in car crashes alone. 88,000 alcohol related deaths a year making it the third most popular cause of preventable death.
Then there’s it’s relationship with sexual assault and date rape as well.
It's not that alcohol is good, it's that it'd be better than khat for Yemen.
For example: Yemen has 35 cars per 1000 people to the US's 797. Yemen would have to leapfrog through several stages of development for drunken driving to become a blip on their public health radar.
