When Tanya Azar lived in the West Bank, she frequented a restaurant
When Tanya Azar lived in the West Bank, she frequented a restaurant nestled in the hills outside Bethlehem. With a canopy for a ceiling, the restaurant was called the “Tent” in Arabic, and the atmosphere inside was loud and friendly. “When you walked in, there were people eating chicken kabobs, shish kabobs, the smell of food, hookah smoke,” she remembered.
After returning to Sacramento where she grew up, she went to work for Kasbah Lounge, the Moroccan restaurant and hookah lounge in midtown. It was natural for her, said Azar, 27. “I really felt like I was back at home.”
The daughter of Palestinian immigrants, Azar recognized hookah as an important custom in that part of the world.
“People want to view the Middle East as very repressed and conservative. It’s quite the contrary,” she said. “Muslims, Jews, Christians, they all have a really big zest for enjoying themselves,” often by indulging in hookah.
Kasbah wouldn’t feel right without it, Azar said.
The centuries-old practice of socializing around a tall glass or metal pipe and inhaling water-cooled, flavored tobacco smoke through a hose is growing increasingly popular here, and not just among people of Middle Eastern heritage. It has become a way to relax for some older customers and part of club-going routines for young, cosmopolitan revelers.
Yet I had no wish to join the smokers I met during my visits to Sacramento hookah lounges. I am accustomed to people smoking cigarettes, but since hookah is unfamiliar to me, to see someone suck on a hose is shocking – especially after researching the effects of chemicals in the sweet-smelling smoke. I wanted to knock away the little plastic nozzle and throw a glass of water at the coals.
Despite its rich cultural significance, hookah contains cancer- and dependency-causing chemicals, just like other tobacco products. To smoke it indoors in commercial spaces is generally illegal. Public health officials in Sacramento and around the state say hookah undermines years of efforts to remove tobacco smoke from restaurants and bars.
In San Francisco, the Department of Public Health is enforcing ordinances against indoor smoking in more than 20 hookah lounges. Inspections and hearings are necessary before the department can order a business owner to stop selling hookah.
It is a drawn-out and contentious process. “We’re not getting voluntary compliance. We’re getting the opposite,” said Tom Rivard, a health department official.
“I just don’t feel that it’s fair whatsoever,” Kareem Marmosh, the owner of Abu’s Café and Grill in Arden Arcade, said of the campaign in San Francisco.
Abu’s is family-operated, so it is exempt from the state’s smoke-free workplace law. But a bill sponsored by state Sen. Mark DeSaulnier would eliminate that exemption, forcing Marmosh’s customers to smoke outdoors. Although the Senate passed the Concord Democrat’s bill in June, it is unlikely to pass the Assembly this year.
Azar thinks customers can decide for themselves whether to visit a hookah lounge. “We’ve never hid the fact that it’s a tobacco product,” she said, adding later, “We’re not in the business to cover it up, like hookah is made of bubble gum and love.”
Yet many hookah smokers may not understand the health risks involved.
“There’s a real misconception that hookah smoking is somehow safer than other kinds of smoking,” said Colleen Stevens, the California Department of Public Health’s chief of tobacco control. “It has the same carcinogens. It has the same health impacts.”
Although the smoke is filtered by water, nicotine and other toxic chemicals are not removed. A hookah burns at a much lower temperature than a cigarette, and a 2005 study by Lebanese researchers found that hookah smoke contains about four times as much nicotine and 80 times as much tar as cigarette smoke for the same amount of tobacco.
“The hookah phenomenon has been going on for a few years, and it started very small,” Stevens said. The department’s most recent survey results, from 2008, indicate that about a quarter of men and 10 percent of women ages 18-24 in California have tried hookah. Those statistics increased by about 25 percent since 2005.
Young people smoke hookah the most, but Azar and Marmosh said they also have other patrons. A typical older customer at Abu’s stops by with a laptop and a book to smoke for a few hours after working out at a nearby gym.
“At the beginning we thought it was somewhat of a fad, but it’s getting more entrenched,” Stevens said.
The smoke-free workplace law permits smoking if a business’s “main purpose” is the sale of tobacco. That means hookah lounges may not sell food or drinks if they allow smoking inside, Stevens said.
Enforcement, though, is the responsibility of local agencies.
Sacramento County health officer Glennah Trochet said she was not aware of hookah lounges here operating illegally. She explained that most of the dozen or so lounges in the county, including Kasbah, do not allow patrons to smoke indoors.
San Francisco’s ordinances are more stringent. Rivard has found himself in cannabis clubs where smoking marijuana was legal, but smoking tobacco was not. He asked patrons to put out their cigarettes.
It is a contradiction that exposes our society’s incoherent attitude toward recreational drug use. Nicotine and alcohol products are legal, but their sale is carefully controlled. Marijuana and other mood-altering painkillers are available by prescription, but the system is certainly vulnerable to abuse. We do not allow people to use these drugs freely, but we cannot bring ourselves to ban them, either. The set of rules we have is a compromise between public health and personal freedom.
Melissa Randel was visiting Sacramento from Eugene, Ore., last weekend and dropped by Abu’s with a friend. She chose to smoke instead of spending the evening at a bar because she knew she would have to drive that night.
“To avoid the entire bar environment and just be in another space is really nice,” said Randel, 24. “I’m really digging the tea and hookah right now.”
The mint tea she drank from a small glass beaker complemented the lemon-mint tobacco blend in the waterpipe. A few glowing coals sat on a perforated foil lid over the bowl. Randel inhaled, drawing air heated by the coals through the tobacco and down into the pipe. When she exhaled, a puff of smoke escaped the hookah.
Randel smokes hookah once every several weeks and doesn’t usually drink while smoking. “I don’t feel like it’s something people do regularly enough” to warrant additional regulatory action, she said.
Stevens disagreed. “One of the reasons we’re concerned about hookah use is that we have really committed to changing the social norms and attitudes about smoking here in the state of California.” Hookah, she said, could make tobacco more acceptable among young people.
Still, marijuana and liquor also contain dangerous, addictive drugs. If hookah is an alternative for youths, the argument that hookah will create unhealthy habits is less convincing.
At Kasbah, where hookah flavors include “Tangerine Dream,” watermelon mint, chocolate mint and “Sex on the Beach,” Azar remembered life in the West Bank. “It’s a little disappointing to me, living here and seeing culture being stripped to please everybody. There are too many people in this world to please everybody,” she said.
The debate over hookah is ultimately about to what extent the government should tell citizens how to live. It is a difficult question to answer. To be sure, hookah is dangerous for all the same reasons that cigarettes are dangerous, and I don’t plan to experiment with either. The same issues were debated when California prohibited tobacco smoking in bars and restaurants. Protecting employees and patrons has always been the priority.
Yet one reason this country is an exciting place to live is that it has often made room for foreign cultural practices, from sushi to bar mitzvahs to St. Patrick’s Day.
Health officials have the law on their side as they push Californians to live a healthier lifestyle. Our society, though, may become a little less interesting.
Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/08/07/3820167/hookah-lounges-are-hot-trendy.html#ixzz1W64Trrhb