One by one, city by city, smoking bans have edged out the agitated and the addicted. There was a time when cigar bars were a sure ticket to safe smoking pleasure and the promise of smoking freedom but it turns out that cigars are carcinogenic. Cigar smoke is concentrated and the monoxides and tars that end up in your lungs surpass those in cigarettes. The cigar rollers will tell you that this is not true, cigar lovers will tell you that they are fortified against disease because they do not inhale and they allow no cigar juice to go down their throats; cigar smokers are laboring under this shared fantasy, but the research stats do not support their collective chimera. The second-hand smoke of cigars is much more rich and just as deadly as second-hand cigarette and pipe smoke. A minority of cigar smokers can not resist the rich flavor of fired burly leaf and inhale, this is really risky.
There is a strange feature of our society that most people don't breathe deliberately unless they are smoking. My smoker friends breathe deeply every time they have a cigar or cigarette but when I have encouraged them to breath as deeply with out the tobacco, they cough like Marines coming out of the teargas hooch. In offices I am always amused to see smokers in the fresh air while their non-smoking colleagues toil in the artificial air of the office building. Living irony.
The clove cigarette was a sign of intelligent life in the '90s. Sophisticate, artsy types began smoking clove cigarettes because they were naive enough to believe that someone would produce a smokeable product that was made purely of herbs and cloves. There is tobacco in clove cigarettes. People soon became addicted and abandoned the clove cigarette for more concentrated delivery systems like American Spirit cigarettes. American Spirit claims that they are the cleanest of the cigarettes on the market. I have read their propaganda and while they might not add a portion of the 599 elements that are included in the recipes of other cigarettes, trying to build a reputation of wholesome cigarettes by comparing your product to the average cigarette is like pushing the argument that a .22cal bullet entering your skull is somehow more safe than a .32cal bullet entering your skull. (The burning of tobacco creates 4000 chemical compounds)
Since 2005, hookah bars have been bubbling up all over the place. A hookah is a big water pipe that has many tubes coming off it so that many people can have a social experience by breathing in the very same mixture of herbs and spices and, oh yes, tobacco. People believe that this hookah smoke is less harmful than cigarette smoke or cigar smoke or clove cigarette smoke because they have been told it is less harmful. Your hookah smoking experience can be enhanced by having a piece of sharp, dark chocolate to nibble on to counter the sweeter flavor of the apple brandy that is wafting through your olfactory and lungs. Yes, there are many ways to enjoy this more safe style of smoking; except that it is not safe.
Research is suggesting that one who is smoking from a hookah is getting more of all the things we loath about cigarettes, more of the vile stuff than even cigarettes can deliver; And, the smaller the hookah, the greater the delivery of monoxides and nicotine and carcinogens. In fact, water pipes deliver the highest levels of carbon monoxides, much higher levels than those of average cigarettes the kind of cigarettes that American Spirit's promoters like to use as a watermark for comparison.
It comes back to the ease of delivery. According to a 2005 report that was published by the World Health Organization, a person takes between 5 and 7 minutes to smoke a cigarette, during this time a cigarette smoker drags on the cigarette between 8 and 12 times and fills his lungs with up to 0.6 liters of all the legendary, cancerous junk that has made cigarettes one of the greatest health risks in the World.
According to the W.H.O. research, hookah smokers take between 50 and 200 drags off the pipe in a comparable smoking session and inhale up to a full liter of smoke. When you allow the statisticians to boil all this down, the hookah smoker will get as much smoke in her lungs in 5 to 7 minutes as a cigarette smoker will in the same amount of time, provided the cigarette smoker smokes 100 cigarettes.
This article appears in Mar 4-10, 2009.