O.K., what’s going on here? You can’t smoke in restaurants and bars in Maryland unless you are an immigrant from the Middle East I guess and you use a cool nifty multicultural pipe instead of dirty old American cigarettes. Yesterday’s Herald-Mail has a story lots of people in Hagerstown, MD are smoking over! It seems that one, Ham Abu-Zayyad, has plans to open a Hookah Cafe in downtown Hagerstown. And, he says that “Hagerstown is going in the right direction.”— not according to all the calls I’ve gotten on it. He says he envisions Hagerstown as the next Frederick (MD). That last is the ultimate slur!
Hookah cafes are increasingly popular in the United States as places where mostly Middle Eastern and Turkish men go to smoke a communal pipe and talk politics, according to several articles I’ve just read about the unhealthy practice. You can go here and learn about the history of hookah smoking and how it was intially a method for smoking opium.
You can go here and learn about health hazards associated with the practice:
The social aspect of hookahs also puts smokers at risk for diseases such as tuberculosis and viruses such as hepatitis and herpes. Shared mouthpieces and the heated, moist smoke may enhance the spread of such diseases.
These diseases are already on a dramatic upward trend anyway due to the haphazard and often non-existent health screening of immigrants entering the US.
And, you can go to the Mayo Clinic warning here and read about the myths surrounding hookah smoking.
What concerns me is how did Abu-Zayyed get the notion that there were going to be enough people to patronize such an establishment here? Is he hoping for more Turkish Russian refugees who are by several accounts such heavy smokers they couldn’t get through their English language lessons without leaving the class frequently for a smoke.
And, I’ll be waiting for an outcry from all the anti-smoking folks, or is this somehow outside the bounds of criticism because of our national reverence for multiculturalism.