Pipe Dreams: Hookah smoking is cool, but is it safe?
On a recent night out in Tampa, 26-year-old Tara Wasserman and a handful of her friends nestle into a dark, plush booth at her favorite hookah hangout, the Meridian Hookah Lounge. For $12 apiece, Wasserman and her friends can sample a variety of sweet tobaccos, smoked through the water pipe at the center of the booth, and stay until the lounge closes at 3 a.m.
The specially cured “shisha” tobaccos come in flavors like guava, strawberry and coconut. Wasserman and friends choose a blend, and servers place a sticky lump of shredded tobacco into a small bowl that’s connected by a stem to the pipe’s water-filled glass base. A piece of foil is placed atop the tobacco, and atop the foil goes a hot coal that heats, but does not ignite, the tobacco. Hoses, each attached to the stem of the hookah, snake across the table.
Along with the tobacco, each smoker gets a plastic tip that she attaches to a hose; sucking on the hose pulls air past the coal and creates a sweet-tasting smoke that’s inhaled after it bubbles through the water. The silky smoke gives off a pleasant aroma similar to sweetened incense or potpourri.
Wasserman and her friends chit-chat about life and listen to music as they puff away, sometimes competing to see who can blow the best smoke rings. Like many hookah devotees, Wasserman, a teacher, is middle-class, mainstream — and wouldn’t touch a cigarette. She likes the “chill atmosphere” of the hookah lounge. The shisha tobacco, she says, “will give you just as much yummy nicotine as cigarettes, without the nasty taste and rat poison.”
A centuries-old Indian apparatus that spread to the Middle East, the hookah is a cousin of the water pipes and bongs often used to smoke marijuana. The beginning of the hookah bar trend in Florida appears to date to 1999: When Jason Bajalia opened the Casbah Cafe in Jacksonville’s upscale Avondale neighborhood, he incorporated hookahs and flavored tobaccos into his theme.
“We started off as just a little Middle Eastern cafe. We’d serve Turkish coffee and pastries and fresh fruit juice and hookahs,” says Bajalia. “It got pretty popular pretty quick and we evolved into a full-service restaurant with entertainment, belly dancing and Middle Eastern musicians, and it just kept growing from there.”