Cigar Weekly

Hookah aficionados' hopes for clemency are up in smoke.

A report going to Vancouver City Council tonight recommends keeping a bylaw that would ban all forms of smoking in indoor public areas, making the city's hookah parlours illegal.

The city voted in January to end exemptions that allow cigar lounges and hookah parlours to operate despite a bylaw banning indoor smoking in public spaces. Hookah parlour proprietors argued their products should be legal as long as they are tobacco free.

The Vancouver Coastal Health Authority disagreed.

"We believe smoking herbs or the products that produce combustion gases or combustion byproducts isn't healthy," said Domenic Losito, the authority's regional director of health protection and co-author of the report.

"From a public health point of view, it's not a good idea to be producing something in a bowl and producing side steam or secondhand smoke in an indoor environment."

Mr. Losito said secondhand smoke from a hookah poses health risks similar to those from secondhand cigarette smoke. The bylaw, which prohibits inhaling, burning or carrying "a lighted cigarette, cigar, pipe, hookah pipe, or other lighted smoking equipment that burns tobacco or other weed or substance" in indoor public areas, should remain as is, he said.

Even products such as incense and air fresheners can pose air-quality problems, he said, although the health risks are not as serious.

Mr. Losito said he is also concerned that hookah smoking is billed as benign compared with cigarettes, when that is not necessarily the case.

Mona Chaaban has had a hookah room in her Lebanese restaurant for a decade. She said she does not think the room, which seats 20 people and has a built-in air filter, poses a health risk.

She said the hookahs make her restaurant an intercultural and intergenerational gathering place.

"It's culturally important: It brings people together. They sit. They socialize. It's beautiful."

Ms. Chaaban stopped offering hookahs while she fought the plan to scrap the exemption and said it hurt her business, reducing her weekday clientele by more than half.

"When people come to my place they really come for the whole experience. ... [Now], my weekdays, if you come to my place, its empty."

Mr. Losito said he appreciates the cultural significance of hookahs but thinks public-health concerns should take precedence.

"If council accepts that argument, it's a pretty slippery slope because you'll have, I think, other cultures coming forward, saying, 'Me too, me too,' and then all of a sudden the smoking prohibitions begin to get watered down.

"I understand the notion of the social gatherings and that, but I think when it comes to public health that would have to come as a first consideration."