Councils get in a hubble-bubble over hookahs

The Local Government Association is in a funk about shisha bars:

‘Smoke-free laws are not offering strong enough punishments to deter irresponsible shisha bar owners who are making lucrative profits, which means councils often need to carry out costly and lengthy investigations to take action against the same bar over and over again.’

Let's piggle away at this one a bit. There's a market for people who want to go to a bar and smoke shisha (hookahs, hubble-bubble pipes for those who don't know about them - interesting that the Arab word, shisha, has come to be most common even among South Asian populations). And, because there are people who want to smoke said hubble-bubble pipes, unscrupulous business owners provide them and make "lucrative" profits.

Seems to me that the problem here isn't the unscrupulousness of owners or the lack of council powers - it's the smoking ban. There is no justification at all for banning people from voluntarily going into a private space to consume a legal drug. Councils are frothing away at this because the bars have priced in the risk of a fine and therefore councils want more powers, no doubt up to and including arrest and imprisonment, to deal with all this.

When we're looking at things that Council's really shouldn't be bothering about, grown men and women smoking shisha in a comfortable bar is up there near the top of the list. What's worse is that these licensing numpties don't understand why such places end up run by ne'er do wells. It's because of that smoking ban again. Organised criminals have always walked in lockstep with the puritans - one lot gets to cash in while the others get to pretend they're stopping "rogues" and protecting the public from terrible and sinful activities.

If you relax the smoking ban - perhaps just to allow cigars clubs, shisha bars and smoking rooms - then nearly all of this dastardly criminality will go away.

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Shisha, the next target for the anti-fun brigade

At its next Council meeting, Bradford Councillors will discuss the scourge of shisha smoking. In a time of austerity, when the Council is cutting services and too many people don't have jobs we're discussing how to shut down a few more businesses and spoil a few more folk's pleasure. But then the motion is from Respect - who seem to have appointed themselves moral guardians of the Asian communities in Bradford! 

I was therefore struck by the Pub Curmudgeon's spot of a similar campaign under way in Manchester:

Traders and  councillors say curry houses are now struggling to compete with the shisha bars and fear it could be the end for the Curry Mile.

They say some of the shisha bars are allowing customers to flout the smoking ban and illegally smoke shisha indoors.

Under the law, the shisha bars are meant to restrict customers to smoking outside, often on a terrace.

Manchester council is  now launching a campaign to crack down on people who flout the smoking ban at shisha bars, and to highlight the health risks of smoking shisha.

And doubtless the main element of the campaign will be this particular lie:

Yes folks this claim - from Bradford NHS - is simply not true. Nor is the claim in our Respect motion that:

...according to the WHO, an hour of smoking shisha for one hour is equivalent to smoking 200 times the volume of smoke in one cigarette.

 There are variations on this story depending on how many times it has been tweaked and adjusted from the original WHO report. And it's still not true:

...studies led by independent researchers at the Royal University of Saudi Arabia have shown that shisha smoke is 30 times less concentrated in chemicals than cigarette smoke, contradicting the WHO's warnings. "It is ludicrous and anti-scientific to claim that hookah or shisha smoke is 200 times more toxic than cigarette smoke," he says. "While about 5,000 chemicals have been identified so far in cigarette smoke, chemists and pharmacologists from Saudi Arabia only found 142 chemicals in shisha smoke. Also, a medical team in Pakistan found that shisha smoke can be much less carcinogenic and radioactive than cigarette smoke."

So shisha is a lot less of a problem than smoking cigarettes. This isn't to say that shisha is harmless just that it is a whole lot less harmful than smoking cigarettes. But that doesn't stop the prohibitionists (as the poster above shows) - despite little or no evidence at all for their claim this is the conclusion:

"The research on shisha is admittedly limited," concedes Anis. "But I have to concur with the WHO. If you watch the way people smoke shisha, they take deliberate, deep breaths before exhaling so there is a lot of smoke being inhaled."

Which rather begs a big question. Surely it's what the smoke contains that the issue rather than how much? The truth is that Dr Anis and the other prohibitionists just don't approve. These people are getting pleasure without purpose, they don't care about their health, they must be stopped!

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Killer Shisha! Or maybe not?

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Health Fussbuckets and Trading Standards in Bradford have got terrible agitated about the growing number of shisha bars in the city.

The district has seen a near six-fold increase in the number of shisha lounges over the last five years. There are known to be 17 lounges, up from the three which were operating in 2007

The Freedom of Information data, released by Bradford Council, following a request from The British Heart Foundation, has prompted the charity to issue a warning about the dangers of inhaling the flavoured tobacco through waterpipes. Dr Mike Knapton, associate medical director at the BHF, said: “Contrary to popular belief, shisha is not safer than smoking cigarettes. 

In fact the most frequently relayed myth about the shisha crops up again:

...a typical one-hour-long shisha smoking session involves inhaling 100–200 times the volume of smoke inhaled from a single cigarette 

Except it isn't quite like that now is it? This from an earlier occasion featuring our National New Puritan Broadcasting Service:

The BBC stands accused of relying on research which has been neither peer-reviewed nor published. The Department of Health and the Tobacco Control Collaborating Centre stand accused of issuing 'science by press release.'

..and the real evidence?

"There are numerous studies on this issue and there is absolutely nothing new in this scare-mongering report. The bottom line is that shisha smokers actually experience the same carbon monoxide exposure as cigarette or cigar smokers do."

However, to return to Bradford's own fussbuckets, there's an interesting twist. Shisha is worse for another reason, these people tell us:

...flavoured tobacco is smoked over coals and fumes from these fuels add new toxins to the dangerous smoke...secondhand smoke poses a serious risk for non-smokers, particularly because it contains smoke not only from the tobacco but also from the heat source, such as charcoal

So I guess we need to start a campaign to ban real fires from pubs too? And stop barbecues? We've been told for all these years that 'secondhand' tobacco smoke is uniquely dangerous, yet now the New Puritans are saying what we've always said - that if cigarette side-stream smoke is bad for you so must be any other kind of smoke or particle filled fumes! Such as diesel...

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