Word: smoke
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Marianne Koole, manager of Grendel’s Den, sits at her bar with a drink. Laughing with patrons, she pauses to take a drag from her cigarette, blowing out the smoke slowly and sharply tapping...
...finals before the winter break at the University of California, Los Angeles, junior Aaron Rothe, 20, was ready to celebrate. So together with a couple of buddies, he made his way to a local cafe, where they sparked up a water pipe and took turns inhaling its piquant smoke. No, California hasn't legalized the recreational use of marijuana. At cafes around UCLA and in college towns across the country, students are passing around the hookah, the ancient Middle Eastern water pipe filled with sweetened tobacco...
...centuries, men in the Middle East have gathered around hookahs to puff fruit-scented smoke, talk and pass the time. In the West, however, the water pipe became synonymous with drug culture in the 1960s, an association that lingers. But in the past couple of years, the hookah has been resurrected in youth-oriented coffeehouses, restaurants and bars, supplanting the cigar as the tobacco fad of the moment. "It's a social thing to do. You can get a hookah and hang out," says Rothe, passing the hose to his friends at the Parisian-style Gypsy Cafe. "It's really...
...come here and see the culture. They see it's not like they make it out on TV, like we're all terrorists. Here they see everyone joined together, dancing, having fun. They see there's nothing to be scared of." Except, of course, for all that secondhand smoke...
Danny McGoldrick, research director for the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, thinks such claims are just blowing smoke. "There is no safe form of tobacco," he says. "There is a danger that young people will see a hookah as something that is fun, yet develop a nicotine addiction." Hoping that the pipe is a passing fad, McGoldrick says the campaign has not done any antihookah outreach thus far. Nor have UCLA health officials, who say tobacco is not a major problem on campus...