For Young People, Hookah is Cool

Sitting in a cloud of cinnamon-scented smoke on the patio of House of Hummus in Murfreesboro last week, Nick Mackie chatted with a group of friends while absent-mindedly surfing the Web on his laptop.

Mackie, House of Hummus’ manager, and his friends were smoking flavored Al Fakher tobacco through a traditional Middle Eastern hookah — a glass chamber filled with water that is usually a couple of feet long. Tobacco on top of the hookah is heated by burning coals. Smokers inhale the tobacco smoke through a hose that is attached to the hookah.

As more hookah bars have cropped up around Middle Tennessee in recent years, young people and college students have taken notice, gathering to socialize in the laid-back bars as if they were coffee shops. Hookah smoke’s fragrant taste and aroma attract fans, but experts and activists say the health risks of hookah smoke are just as serious as those associated with cigarettes.

Their customers come from a broad range of ages and ethnicities, but hookah smoking is especially popular among college students and other young people, who take advantage of hookah bars’ late-night hours in droves.

Some local hookah bars are able to eschew state smoking laws, which limit indoor smoking to 21-and-up establishments, by opening large windows.

Cassie Alexander, 20, started coming to hookah bars a year and a half ago. She sees them as a less caloric alternative to all-night greasy spoons.

“I like the flavors,” she said. “And it doesn’t make me full.”

Risks disputed

“I used to play sports so I don’t like nicotine and tar,” said Bebo Saman, owner of Bebo’s Café, a hookah bar on Second Avenue in Nashville.

Saman, who moved to the United States from Egypt five years ago, smokes hookah daily. Saman said he opened his bar a year ago because it is part of his cultural background.

Saman said shisha, the tobacco smoked in a hookah, is safer than the tobacco in cigarettes.

“It’s called tobacco, but it doesn’t affect you like a cigarette,” he said.

A 2005 report from the World Health Organization contradicts Saman, saying that hookah smoke contains a number of toxic elements, including tar, nicotine and carbon monoxide.

Wendell Yarbrough, an assistant professor of cancer biology at Vanderbilt University, refuted the suggestion that the water in a hookah purifies smoke.

“The data really says that the risk of hookah smoking is the same as cigarette smoking,” he said. “The bubbling through the water and all of that doesn’t eliminate any of the carcinogens in tobacco smoke.”

Communal hookah-smoking sessions regularly stretch beyond the bounds of a five-minute cigarette break. This can mean hookah smokers actually inhale more harmful smoke than cigarette smokers do, Yarbrough said.

“It’s just another fad or another gimmick that somehow gets touted as a safe way to consume tobacco, and of course it’s not,” he said.

Betsy Janes, director of advocacy for the American Lung Association in Tennessee and Kentucky, said the increased popularity of hookah bars is a result of a “marketing technique” intended to increase the mystique of tobacco.

“It’s attractive to children, and that’s the whole problem,” she said.

'It's a social activity'

For several hookah smokers in Middle Tennessee, the health risks pale in comparison to its benefits.

“I don’t think it’s safer,” said Angela Latore, a 21-year-old who visited Bebo’s Cafe last week. “I work at a hospital so I know it’s not safer.”

However, Latore said, she never smokes cigarettes and doesn’t smoke hookah very often.

Latore comes to Bebo’s Cafe with her boyfriend. She likes the mixed-fruit tobacco. He prefers the lemon-mint flavor.

“You can literally, as you’re smoking it, taste the fruit,” she said.

“You don’t get that nasty cigarette smell when you smoke hookah.”

Across the room in Bebo’s Cafe, Heather Thompson, 24, sat around a hookah with three friends. For her, hookah’s appeal has little to do with smoking.

Instead, Thompson said, hookah stands out because it’s a social outlet that isn’t always connected to other vices.

“It’s not a social setting where you feel like you have to be drinking a lot,” she said.

Mackie started smoking hookah while studying in the Middle East two years ago. Now, the recent MTSU graduate said he sees hookah as a daily chance to unwind with others.

“It’s a social activity where you come, you relax, you talk. … Hookah is about being in a group,” he said. “People don’t smoke alone.”

Garrett Chesak, 18, sat across from Mackie smoking peach-pie-flavored hookah. He said hookah brings people together in a relaxed environment that encourages camaraderie.

“I think the United Nations should have hookahs by their desks,” he said.