Hooked on hookah
It could be a scene from a Hollywood movie: Sofas and tables lining the walls of a dimly lit establishment, with hookah pipes stationed at intervals throughout the room, as shadowy figured puff away into the night.
These days, the scene could be acted out in a hookah bar on the corner of any Oklahoma college town. Smoking tobacco from 
hookah pipes has gained popularity over the past five years, mainly among students and soldiers returning from overseas tours of duty.
Jeremy Meigs, retail sales manager for Evolution in Tahlequah, stocks his store with hookahs of all sizes, along with “shisha” – raw, leaf, flavored tobacco products – and charcoal discs for heating the tobacco.
“Hookah is a time-honored tradition in the Middle East,” said Meigs. “It seems like new [American] traditions are brought about by war. With Vietnam, it was heroin; with Iraq, it’s hookah.”
Meigs said part of what makes shisha attractive is the cost and the purity of the product.
“Shisha isn’t ground up and treated with chemicals,” he said. “It’s raw leaf tobacco and molasses. In the Middle East, they have molasses left over from making sugar, and basically is used as a preservative for the tobacco. It pickles it.”
The charcoal discs are used to heat the shisha, because it cannot be lit with an ordinary flame.
“The molasses prevents the shisha from burning when using a regular lighter,” said Meigs, as he assembled a hookah to demonstrate. “The bowl that holds the shisha is usually made from either clay or glass, and is vented on the bottom.”
Shisha is loosely loaded in the bowl, then covered with a censure – a wire mesh screen. The charcoal disc is placed on top of the censure to heat the shisha. The body of the hookah is filled with water, so when a person draws smoke from the bowl, it is filtered and delivered in a vaporized form.
Most hookahs have one or more hoses and stems, so it can be enjoyed by either one person or a group. Meigs stocks hookahs ranging in price from $50 to $300, and the sizes range anywhere from 6 inches tall to around 3 feet.
“They make an eight-hose hookah floor model that’s set on wheels so it can be wheeled around from table to table,” said Meigs.
Matthew Lacey, a Tahlequah High School graduate who was in the store Wednesday, said he loved smoking from a hookah.
“I tried it when I was working as a Department of Defense contractor for KBR in Iraq,” said Lacey. “They had cigar and hookah bars all over the place in Dubai [United Arab Emirates]. The flavors in the shisha are great, and the nicotine rush you get from the concentration of tobacco is astounding.”
Lacey has even seen small hookahs used in cars overseas.
© Tahlequahdailypress
the attachments to this post:
hookah water pipe
