Old debate, new rules: Put it in your pipe and smoke it, say hookah lovers

KARACHI:

The age-old debate of smoking in public places lit up again with Sindh’s lawmakers passing a resolution on May 10, banning shisha or hookah smoking at public places.

“They are forcing us to smoke behind closed doors now, this is how things go wrong in this country,” said Owais, a banker in his early 30s, sitting at a well-known café in Zamzama. For him, the government is out to ban things that “people enjoy the most”.

Indeed, pro-hookah people are quick to point out that the ban on smoking and using other addictive substances should be the government’s first priority. “What about the people who chew ghutka?” asks a college student sitting next to Owais. “Why ban something harmless?”

But the shisha is not harmless, as many people believe. It delivers a hit of tobacco worth 100 cigarettes, all deceptively masked by the fruity flavours of strawberry and apple.

A paper published in the Journal of the Pakistan Medical Association as far back as in 1993 studied the percentage of carbon monoxide in the hookah using local charcoal. Small hookahs delivered the most of the poisonous gas to the smoker’s lungs and as the size of the hookah increased, the level dropped because of the volume of air in the water base, fire bowl volume, pipe length, etc. Hookah smokers are additionally exposed to the carcinogenic or cancer-causing effect of hydrocarbons and heavy metals in the charcoal, according to the British Medical Journal.

Dr Javaid heads the anti-smoking cell in Sindh. He quoting a recent survey by the International Journal of TB and Lung Diseases, France, which said almost 50 per cent of youngsters in Pakistan smoke shisha.

The restaurant owners

Café owners have reacted with the argument that the customer is always right. As business owner Shahbaz Mukaram in Defence Phase VII, put it: “Customers do not listen to us at all. Rather they dictate what we do”.

“If we ban smoking at our restaurant, where will the poor smokers go?” asked Fatima Lodhi, a manager at Time Out at The Forum shopping mall. She stressed that they did have a patio but because of the heat people generally preferred to sit inside where there is a non-smoking section. Ajay Solanki, the owner of Café Coffee Day at Zamzama, also pointed out that they had a non-smoking area. The same goes for most other Zamzama establishments.

But according to Dr Javaid Khan, an associate professor and consultant chest physician at the Aga Khan University Hospital, separate smoking sections are an illusion. Air conditioners in restaurants and cafes help spread the smoke all over. Even if the management feels that it is doing people a service, “I want to inform them it is far more dangerous for their customer’s health that they can imagine.”

The Prohibition of Smoking and Protection of Non-Smokers Health Ordinance 2002, declares that public spaces, for instance restaurants, hotels, cafeterias, are smoke-free zones. Other spaces that fall in this category are a “place of public work or use” such as waiting areas, a hotel lounge, eating houses, amusement centres and places visited by the public.

The government has made sporadic attempts to enforce the rules. In June 2009 and again in the same year in July, it declared that public spaces had to be smoke free. Sindh Public Health Director Dr Masood Ahmed Solangi said that for about six months the cell has sent “hundreds of emails and written notifications” to Pizza Hut, for example. “After a while we got to know that no action has been taken at all,” he told The Express Tribune.

Pizza Hut at Bahadurabad was one outlet that was warned. The head of Pizza Hut is out of the country, informed its manager Usman. He refused to speak about laws and suggested that the marketing team be contacted. Marketing manager Mohammed Ammar explained that he has to consider business too. “The very fact that people go out to restaurants is to relax and enjoy,” he said. “We do not want to spoil it for them. We have to look at it from their point of view as well.”

He acknowledged that they had received notifications from the government and doctors but added that that due to “time constraints” he could not promptly reply to them.

“These people are educated and understand the law better than us,” said Dr Solangi. “But after a while we’ll have to take a stronger stance and take action to stop it.”

 

Names have been changed to protect privacy

Published in The Express Tribune, May 16^th, 2011.