Chennai cops crack down on deadly hookah

Chennai: If your youngster comes home late and is carrying some pleasant fruit-flower aroma such as apple or strawberry, press the alarm bell. The kid could be hooked onto the deadly hookah, whose nicotine content is said to be some 200 times more than the cancer-causing cigarette.

“You have to be watchful if your youngster is coming home late, regularly and for no good reason. And be alarmed if the kid smells of something as pleasant as apple or strawberry”, said S. Rajendran, deputy commissioner of police, Kilpauk. He has had some half a dozen ‘coffee houses’ in his zone these last six months because they were providing hookah services to their customers, despite the serious health implications and the Supreme Court ban.

Only last week, in yet another zone, Teynampet to be exact, a coffee shop was locked up and its boss taken into custody for having nine hookahs busy in his special smoke zone. Police estimate that dozens of these hookah joints have been doing brisk business in posh-looking coffee shops across the city, and elsewhere too. Smoking this pipe gadget originating from the Middle East over 500 years ago is considered ‘royal’ and ‘fashionable’, besides being safe unlike the cigarette because it contains no nicotine.

“The truth is that hookah does have nicotine; in fact, it has 200 times more nicotine than the deadly cigarette. Besides, there are other health hazards sharing the hookah mouthpiece without washing due to risk of spreading not just colds and flu but more dangerous oral herpes”, said the concerned DC Rajendran. He said following instructions from Commissioner A.K.Viswanathan, a crackdown has begun sometime back and “anyone spotting a hookah anywhere, please inform us in public interest”.

What is a hookah?

A hookah is a water pipe used to smoke tobacco through cooled water. The tobacco is heated in the bowl at the head of the hookah and the smoke is filtered through the water in its base. The moist and sticky tobacco is soaked in honey or molasses, with a variety of flavours such as apple, plum, strawberry and coconut, added. Apart from nicotine, hookah smoke contains higher levels of arsenic, lead and nickel, 36 times more tar and 15 times more carbon monoxide than cigarette. This is because smoking a hookah requires taking longer and harder drags, increasing the levels of carcinogens and nicotine in the lungs. Even if someone merely hangs out in a hookah bar without smoking, he (she) is still exposed to secondhand smoke.