The image of a shisha smoker is soothing, and in the concert of tobacco demonization it seems a classy and perhaps healthier remedy than cigarettes. Containment promotes – it seems – its use.
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 mouth of the smoker. During its journey, the smoke is cooled in a water tank. It is the freshness and fragrant smell, usually fruity, that gives shisha this reputation for less toxicity.
However, it is not. It is even the opposite.
A puff of shisha is the same danger as a cigarette. When we know that in one hour, a smoker aspires on average 40 times, it is therefore the equivalent of 2 packs 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 smoking six cigarettes.
Two reasons for such dangerousness: first, the power of inhalation. One liter of smoke with each inhale, 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 while 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 addiction certainly, but much, much more cancers and diseases of heart.
However, the breakthrough of shisha in France is impressive. In two years, among Parisians, 53% of those under 16 and 75% of those under 19 have tried it at least once. 30% smoke it regularly, including 7% of students.
Doctor Jean-Francois Lemoine
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