Joseph Caruso, PhD
Joseph Caruso, PhD, professor, department of chemistry, University of Cincinnati. His study was published in Analytical Methods.
My college-age son is no dummy, but he started doing a very dumb thing. The fact that he wasn’t the only one—an estimated 22% to 40% of all US college students have done the same stupid thing in the past year—was scant comfort. What was this idiocy? Smoking tobacco from a hookah.
Hookahs are water pipes, and they can be simple or quite elaborate-looking. Typically they stand several feet tall and have a long hose attached to a mouthpiece. Hookah smoking is a social fad—it’s often done in groups, with the mouthpiece being passed from person to person. The practice originated centuries ago in Persia and India and has recently become all the rage among American teens and young adults.
The problem: Hookah fans often claim that this type of smoking is basically benign, especially compared with other types of smoking. But that’s a load of BS…as you’ll see below.
If kids you care about are in their teens or 20s, there’s a good chance that they have fallen for the hookah hype—or soon will. Though hookahs are slightly more popular with boys, lots of girls smoke them, too. Arming yourself with information can help you convince youngsters to stay away from hookahs. How do I know? My own son swore off the water pipe parties when I shared the following facts with him…
A typical hookah consists of a bowl to hold the tobacco…a long metal body…a jar half-filled with water (which cools the smoke)…and a flexible hose with a mouthpiece. The tobacco is covered with foil and then with charcoal which, when lit, ignites the tobacco.
Hookah smokers use a special tobacco mixture called shisha (sold online and in stores). This gooey mix contains tobacco plus molasses, glycerin, honey and/or flavorings (chocolate, mint, cherry, licorice, etc.). These added flavors make the tobacco taste better—but contrary to what some hookah smokers believe, they do nothing to “counteract” the harmful effects of the tobacco.
These kids are smoking, pure and simple. They are breathing in all the usual nasty stuff found in cigarettes—including carbon monoxide and other combustion products as well as highly addictive nicotine.
For the new study, researchers looked at the levels of 18 metals (including lead and the “metalloid” arsenic) in 12 different commercially available hookah tobacco mixtures—eight from the US and four imported from the Middle East. They determined the levels of these toxic metals in the tobacco mixtures, in the smoke they produced and in what was left in the water. Findings…
If your kid claims that hookah smoking is safer than cigarette smoking, here’s the info you need to counter his arguments…
Bottom line: No matter how trendy or exotic a hookah may seem, it is not a safe way to smoke. If anyone you know uses a hookah—or might—send him or her this article.