1 Seventeen university students sit in a café in Kaslik, a coastal town half an hour's drive north of Beirut. Ten boys and seven girls, all sucking on water pipes - waiters wade through a thin but unmistakable pool of smoke in the air.
2 More young people smoke water pipes in Lebanon than perhaps anywhere else on earth, and in 2011, the government moved to ban smoking indoors as part of Law 174. But the tobacco and restaurant industry mustered a campaign many believe was highly and typically misleading that wound back the public smoking ban earlier this year.
3 The consequence of this is young Lebanese have been left with policies that fail to decrease their risk of smoking at a time when the behavior of smokers is changing, perhaps for the worse.
4 "When it comes to water pipes we're talking about almost the same toxins, the same cancerous agents, just in greater volumes,' says Associate Professor Rima Nakkash of the American University of Beirut. Nakkash helped shape Law 174, which included three main strategies, or "pillars", to help reduce smoking rates in the Lebanese population. She considers this current government a waste to work with as they have so many issues, and they have shown to be impotent.
. Global water pipe smoking data is sketchy because it's only come back into fashion in the last decade or so. However, given the practice, it is clearly most popular in the enst Mediterranean; it looks likely more young Lebanese smoke water pipes than any country in the world
6 And the World Health Organization is concerned about the water pipe smoking that could be working as a gateway to cigarette smoking as well as a false "halfway house" between smoking cigarettes and quitting-cigarette smokers use water pipes as a strategy for quitting. only to go back to cigarettesquat audience
7 The restaurant syndicate argued, amongst other things, that hookah is a rich part of Lebanese culture, and the ban on smoking in public areas would hurt their revenue.researchers counter that hookah came back only in the last decade, which is why they don't have a handle on precisely how damaging it is to the user's health.
8 "We don't have a lot of long-term health effect studies because this is a phenomenon that's started in the last ten years." says Nakkash. "So we need to be able to follow up smokers who regularly smoke water pipes and do similar studies to see the long-term effects of this health habit."
9 The World Health Organization also laments that research on the precise health impacts of water pipe smoking against cigarette smoking remains patchy. But it also stresses, "every study to date has found that water pipe tobacco smoke contains ample quantities of toxicants known to cause diseases in cigarette smokers, including cancer".
10 Additionally, anti-tobacco campaigners point out the predictions pat serio of massive losses in revenue from the hospitality sector due to a public smoking ban but had no international examples to back them up.
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11 While anti-smoking advocates have universally received the public smoking ban U-turn as a big defeat for the cause, Law 174 had two more of three "pillars" that are still standing.
12 The first of the other two is better health warnings for tobacco products. Lebanon's cigarette packets now have bigger textual Warnings on them. Unfortunately this doesn't apply to hookah in Lebanon. Turkey, for example, has extended the warning labels to the water pipe bottles.
13 The second is san advertising ban, which has been well monitored by the Consumer Protection Office, according to Nakkash. However, she adds the tobacco companies consistently try to undermine the laws with 'selling campaigns, instead of classic marketing or promotional campaigns. This tendency by the tobacco companies to ignore or undermine Lebanese legislation goes back to the early 1970s.
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14 As the students in the Kaslik café continue to pass around the water pipe, the owner was asked whether he was aware of the complex, international battles going on over tobacco consumption of cigarettes and water pipes. He said "not really," adding later, "In Lebanon, we have a lot to worry about.
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