Clouds of aromatic smoke are accompanied by the hypnotic sound of bubbling hookahs. It’s a Sunday evening at Cafe Tangiers, and owner Karim Raja Fallah is savouring the scene – and his own apple-flavoured water pipe smoke – while he can.
That was several months ago, before council’s ban on shisha lounges went into effect on April 1. Full-on enforcement won’t take place till next month.
When it does, it will mark the second time in little more than a year that Fallah’s business has gone up in smoke, so to speak. Last May, an electrical fire gutted his lounge. He spent $50,000 and six months renovating. “I worked very hard to get the business back up, and now they want to take it away from me,” he says.
For the time being, his regular clientele, cultivated over the years, continues to visit his Danforth-and-Greenwood-area business on a strip known as “shisha central.”
But all of that may eventually evaporate. Fallah still has three years remaining on his lease. He and other lounge owners say this is one of the most unfair aspects of the ban – they’ve entered into long-term commercial leases only to have the goalposts shifted on them.
Councillor Joe Mihevc, chair of the Board of Health, says they should’ve seen it coming. “We’ve been debating this issue for the past two years,” he says. He swats away suggestions that the city should compensate people like Fallah.
“We had similar struggles when we banned smoking in restaurants and bars,” Mihevc says. “The owners said the smoking ban was going to kill them. Yet more often than not their business actually went up.”
But lawyer Noel Gerry, who represents a group of shisha owners hoping to fight the ban, says that comparison is off. “In the case of shisha lounges, the smoking is the main economic activity, as opposed to the sale of food or alcohol,” he says.
Gerry’s clients are currently weighing their legal options. Mihevc thinks they shouldn’t bother.
“The smart people will spend their money on refashioning their business, while the ones who are bitter will perhaps spend their resources on lawyers, which would be a tragedy for them,” he says.
Fallah is definitely bitter, and it shows. “Those who want us to change our business should change their job first,” he says.
***
Cafe Tangiers looks, smells and feels like a Middle Eastern oasis. Traditional seating and Arabic music provide a taste of home for people from the Middle East and North Africa.
“This is a place where people come to find out what’s going on in each others’ families, spread information and raise money for community causes,” Fallah says. “If they take away this place, we’re going to lose these ties. It’s not just about smoking.”
Last year someone in the Moroccan community was laid off, and soon after his father died. He couldn’t afford to go to Morocco, so patrons made donations to cover his airfare.
“I like to hang out here to connect with people from my community,” says Hassan, a regular at Cafe Tangiers. “I don’t have to pick up the phone and arrange an appointment. I can just drive down here and sit, chat and play cards with people I know.”
While the vibe at Cafe Tangiers is distinctly mellow, downtown shisha lounges tend to draw a younger and livelier crowd.
Shishalicious, located near Ryerson University, is a spacious lounge that’s popular with Muslim youth looking for an alternative to alcohol-fuelled weekend nights. “Halal chilling,” as one customer put it to me.
“Many of the customers who come here don’t really drink, go to bars or smoke weed, so this is their only place to chill,” says manager Sheryl Efondo. “Many of them have grown up with it, and it’s a part of their culture.”
***
Kamal Chaouachi, a tobacco scientist at Université Paris-Dauphine in Paris, says shisha has long been a key social adhesive in many cultures.
“Even a place like Syria, in spite of the war, offers one of the best -examples of Middle Eastern sociability as expressed by its coffee houses and patios with their gurgling narghiles [hookahs],” he says.
Chaouachi suggests bans on -lounges in other countries partly arises from Western society’s cultural disconnect and discomfort with the unique brand of social bonding that shisha promotes.
But Councillor Mihevc says the culture needs to evolve to conform to modern-day public health goals. “Traditions and cultures are not static they are dynamic. There are great things and sometimes nasty things in each culture.”
***
As far as Toronto Public Health is concerned, the ban on shisha houses is simply a responsible public health intervention.
“Shisha smoke has been associated with both long-term and short-term health effects, including an increased risk of heart, lung and gum disease and esophageal, gastric and lung cancers,” says Loren Vanderlinden, manager of TPH’s Healthy Public Policy Directorate.
Chaouachi agrees that a lot of the evidence suggests this, but scoffs at the popular notion that a shisha session is equivalent to smoking 200 cigarettes. He says lab experiments on shisha utilize “smoking robots” programmed to draw puffs every 17 seconds over the course of an hour – nothing like how shisha is smoked by people in real environments.
“Sharing a pipe or chatting while smoking is very different from being a grotesque smoking robot,” he says.
But what about the dangers of passive smoking?
“There is exposure of both users and bystanders to unacceptably high and, in some cases, hazardous levels of harmful chemicals, such as carbon monoxide, particulate matter and carcinogens,” says Vanderlinden.
TPH and city council are concerned that second-hand smoke is a real threat, particularly to those who work in the lounges.
But Rolla Tahir, who’s worked at Cafe Tangiers for five years, says, “It’s not like I’m working here against my will. I’d call it a ‘lifestyle’ job. If somebody likes coffee, they’d work in a coffee shop. I like shisha, so I work in a shisha place.”
Fallah says the ban will lead to the proliferation of underground, unsupervised shisha dens.
“Here we ID anyone who looks underage and don’t serve alcohol,” Fallah says. “But underground, people will mix it with alcohol and who knows what other substances, and kids will be able to smoke.”
TPH says the ban on shisha lounges is merely a “first step,” and any underground shisha dens that crop up will be duly dealt with.
Meanwhile, Fallah and other lounge owners are left to grapple with what they perceive as an ethnically targeted prohibition.
“They wouldn’t have banned shisha if it were an important tradition for Canadians,” he says. “They’re treating us like second-class citizens.”
Shisha 101
The earliest rudimentary shisha apparatus consisted of a coconut shell and a rigid, hollow pipe. However, the ornamental hookah we know today is believed to have been devised in the 16th century by Irfan Shaikh, a physician and member of the court of the Mughal Emperor Akbar the Great (whose grandson Shah Jahan erected the Taj Mahal).
Today shisha is most popular in the Middle East and North Africa as a cultural tradition and social activity for commoners.
A single bowl of shisha can last for up to three hours. Unlike cigarettes, shisha smoking is considered a form of relaxed entertainment.
Commonly called “hookah” in India and Pakistan, “shisha” in most Arab countries and North Africa and “narghile” in Turkey, Lebanon and Israel.
Fruit-flavoured shisha became popular in the late 1980s, prior to that the device was used mostly to smoke straight tobacco, opium and hashish.
news@nowtoronto.com | @nowtoronto
