By Reed O’Mara and Shakarra McGuire
For some, stress relief comes from yoga classes, curling up with a good book or Netflix. For Adham Abdelraouf, stress melts away with the exhale of every hookah puff.
“It’s just like a stress reliever,” said Abdelraouf, a senior majoring in economics and finance. “It relaxes you. It’s not per se addicting. I mean, I’ve gone a month or so without smoking. It’s more like, if I’m feeling stressed out and want to relax a little bit, I can smoke hookah.”
Hookah, or narghile, is a smoking apparatus from India and the Middle East where flavored tobacco called shisha is passed through a water basin before the steam is inhaled. Hookahs can have one or more hoses for multiple smokers and have become increasingly popular among college students. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, prevalent hookah use among college students in the U.S. is between 22 and 40 percent.
Sarah Salava, a junior majoring in finance and management, has been smoking since her freshman year and said though she finds it hard to judge, hookah smokers on campus have increased.
“My perception is that there’s more people [smoking hookah],” Salava said. “I don’t know if it’s because I know more people and have gotten into different groups of people, but my freshman year I would smoke with people who hadn’t ever done it, seen it, before, and now it’s like, with my friends, it’s not uncommon pretty much anywhere you go. Somebody’s got a hookah.”
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Hookah is an activity centered on social interaction and is not usually smoked alone. Abdelraouf said it’s more about fitting into the situation than anything else and that smoking alone or every day is pointless. Salava said hookah can be a mix of productivity and social interaction and is not limited to a party scene.
“I mean, a lot of times when we hookah, it’s a group of five or six of us sitting around doing homework,” Salava said. “We’ve got our books, our laptops out, and it’s just a way to do homework but also do something social.”
When it comes to cigarettes, Abdelraouf said “absolutely not.” He said he has heard nothing but negative information about them since he was a kid. Abdelraouf said hookah should not be grouped with activities that raise health concerns such as drinking or smoking.
“I understand where they’re coming from with the health aspect of it, but it’s not a thing like cigarettes where you do it every day or multiple times a day,” Abdelarouf said. “It’s not as harmful as drinking. You don’t lose sight of what’s going on, whereas if you get drunk, you get sloppy.”
Salava has her own opinion about cigarettes versus hookah.
“For the health risk, [hookah] seems a lot less than cigarettes because it’s not actual smoke, it’s just vapor,” Salava said. “And they say that it’s bad, but what isn’t?”
She said the more prominent risk with hookah for her is burns in her carpet.
“I burned my carpet once last year, which I had to pay for. The coal was heating on the stove, and I put it on a plate to bring it to the hookah, and the hookah wasn’t ready yet, so I just set the plate on the ground, and of course it burned through the plate and melted the carpet to the plate,” Salava said.
Hookah is cheaper than cigarettes, especially after the initial investment on a personal hookah, which is less expensive in the long run than going to a hookah bar regularly. As the flavors of tobacco and nicotine intensities vary, so do the prices.
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“When you do it with friends, you can get three or four sessions probably for 15 bucks, so we share the cost of it,” Salava said.
A more common association with hookah is the assumption that it is illegal and a way to smoke marijuana, or, as in the Middle East, opium.
Whether for relaxation or otherwise, hookah is an activity that unites.
“You can go out with your friends and do something, go see a movie or run around town, but a lot times, if you’re not wanting to be drinking, and you’re just hanging out in your living room, it’s just something to share rather than all sitting there and staring at the wall,” Salava said.
Students now have even greater opportunity to try out hookah with the opening of a new hookah lounge on the Strip.
Von Ewing, a former Crimson Tide football player left his position as a regional manager for Verizon Wireless to open the newest addition to student life on the Strip: the Blue Caterpillar Hookah Lounge. The lounge opened in November 2013.
The Blue Caterpillar offers five different brands of flavored tobacco, the most of any hookah lounge in Alabama. The prices range from $10 to $16 based on quality and customer preference.
The newest addition to the Strip reaches out to a less rowdy crowd, Ewing said, because he recalls just how unpredictable nights on University students’ favorite playground can be.
“It’s sociable; it’s relaxing,” Ewing said. “We want to bring a realm of calmness to the Strip.”
Despite the understandable realm of competition among the different bars on the Strip, he said the business atmosphere is not quite a recreation of “Mean Girls.” He credited the owner of Steamers with giving him a few new business tips and emphasized that his main goal is to make happy customers.
“We are a new business,” Von Ewing said. “We have a plan to be the best hookah lounge in the state of Alabama, and we want to be known as a student lounge.”
The Blue Caterpillar is open Monday through Sunday from 6 p.m. to 3 a.m. Nightly drink and hookah specials can be found online by following their Twitter, @BlueCatHookah, or their Instagram account, thebluecaterpillarhookah.
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