The image of a shisha smoker is calming, and in the tobacco demonization gig, it seems a classy and perhaps healthier remedy than cigarettes. Let us recall its principle: a piece of tobacco is placed at the top of a beautiful copper device, which a long pipe connects to the smoker’s mouth. During its journey, the smoke is cooled in a water tank. It is the freshness and the fragrant smell, usually fruit, that gives the Chicha this reputation for less toxicity.
However, it is not. It is even the opposite. A puff of shisha represents the same danger as a cigarette. When we know that in an hour, a smoker inhales on average 40 times, it is therefore the equivalent of 2 packets of cigarettes that go into the lungs. And passive smokers are not spared: spending an hour next to a smoker in a shisha bar is like consuming six cigarettes.
Two reasons for such dangerousness: first, the power of inhalation. A liter of smoke with each breath, the equivalent of a whole cigarette. Then, the size of the particles of a tobacco composed of a quarter of tobacco for three quarters of molasses, which by being consumed, gives rise to particles as small as those produced by diesel and which go straight to the bottom of the lungs.
A quarter of tobacco and the passage in water, it is sixteen times less nicotine, therefore less dependence of course, but much, much more cancer and heart disease.
Yet the breakthrough of the shisha in France is impressive. In two years, among Parisians, 53% of under-16s and 75% of under-19s have tried it at least once. Thirty% smoke it regularly, of which 7% are students.
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