cigarettes

Some young people like to loosen up with a beer or two, or a casual cigarette. Some choose to go outside while others shun such substances altogether. Today, there’s a growing crowd that likes to kick back and inhale a little something called shisha. But don’t let the fruity aroma fools you: you’re smoking tobacco. Shisha is tobacco that has been blended with molasses and flavored. Shisha is smoked out of a water pipe, usually called a hookah. The shisha is placed in a bowl at the top of the hookah and burned using a small coal on top of aluminum foil or similar kind of material. The bowl has holes in the bottom allowing the smoke to travel down the body and into a water-filled vessel at the base of the hookah. The water cools and adds moisture to the smoke before it’s inhaled out through a connecting hose. Shisha smoking dates back hundreds of years in the Middle East.

Hemporium manager Liam Kelly said: “Shisha is a much more recent phenomenon in North America. It used to be a Middle-East thing, and then it came up here. Shisha has become an overnight sensation in Kingston. It’s almost all students that come in to buy shisha from Hemporium. More specifically, it’s predominantly Queen’s students. I think it’s basically word-of-mouth around students and it’s because it’s tobacco and it’s addictive. “Apple” and “double apple” are by far the most popular flavors of shisha. I’ve just heard people say it’s the smoothest. Even small smoke shops have shisha and shisha supplies.”

Dr. Lutz Forkert, associate professor in the School of Medicine, said: “The volume of smoke is what makes shisha harmful. The volume of smoke in a bowl is much higher than a cigarette. … Therefore, it must be that the effects are worse.” This means shisha smokers are still at risk of many ailments, including heart disease, respiratory disease, cancer, impotency, infertility and complications during pregnancy. The added nicotine also makes shisha just as addictive as cigarettes. Culturally speaking, the only people who smoke it are young people. It’s been shown that labels on cigarette packages have been effective. … Whether that deterrent would be effective in a college crowd, I don’t know.”