About Shisha Addiction: Signs of Addiction

Shisha is a social phenomenon. It’s an exotic-looking, mysterious, ornate, sophisticated apparatus that is quite literally centre of a group of people having a good time. It comes with bright and vivid colors, a mystique pattern and gives smokers the potential to make smoke rings amongst their friends and impress them with this novel method of smoking. Shisha smoking enables groups of friends to sit and ponder deeply about issues they would otherwise not discuss, and all of these factors make shisha socially addictive. So it’s not just the nicotine that get’s you hooked on the hookah.

Some of the experts in shisha research have interviewed people who smoke shisha regularly. They found out 28% wanted to quit smoking shisha, but well over half of them had tried to quit but failed to do so.

A few years later, more research was completed and it showed that some shisha smokers started to have cravings similar to those seen in cigarette smokers. Remember that shisha smoking is frighteningly different to cigarettes, because if you’re getting addicted to shisha you simply take in deeper breaths and more puffs to get your body’s desired levels of nicotine (called “titration”). This makes the smoker unaware of how much nicotine they actually need to satisfy their body’s demands, and it’s hard to measure. However, with cigarettes it is a lot more straightforward – if you need more nicotine, you smoke more cigarettes – so it’s easier to measure how addicted someone is to cigarettes compared to shisha.

Signs of Addiction

Whether you’re addicted to alcohol, cigarettes, shisha, Facebook or computer games, the signs of addiction are generally the same. If you find any of the following habits, then think twice about how addicted you may be:

·         You spend too much time and money on shisha compared to occasional shisha smokers

·         You go out of your way to smoke shisha, especially at unordinary times, such as in the morning

·         You get annoyed if people criticise your shisha smoking habits

·         You lie to people about your shisha smoking habits

·         You smoke shisha on your own

·         You find it hard to quit smoking shisha even though you’ve tried several times

·         Shisha smoking has impacted on your daily routine i.e. you don’t get enough sleep because you smoke shisha late that also makes you late for college or work.

Which is Worse, Shisha or Cigarette?

According to the French anti-tobacco agency (OFT), a report from the French national laboratory revealed that smoking shisha gives off as much carbon monoxide as 15 to 52 cigarettes and as much tar as 27 to 102 cigarettes. Bertrand Dautzenberg, OFT President said, "The report confirms that smoking shisha is a major source of air pollution in closed and covered areas. If comparing the data to regular cigarette smoke, one shisha corresponds to1 an average of around 70 drags on a cigarette."

The tests were conducted by Laboratoire National d'Essais (LNE) on three types of shisha: shisha with self-lighting carbon used in small amounts, self-lighting carbon used in large amounts, and natural carbon shisha used in small volumes. The laboratory used the three parameters that are measured when analyzing smoke on a packet of cigarettes: the amount of tar, nicotine, and carbon monoxide.

For 70 liters (16 gallons) of smoke produced by the shisha, the small amount self lighting carbon tar results were measured at 319 milligrams, 32 times the legal European limit for a cigarette, while the large amount self-lighting carbon measured at 266 milligrams, 27 times the cigarette limit, and the natural carbon measured at 1,023 milligrams, a 102 times more than a cigarette.

Carbon monoxide measurements fared badly as well, as tests indicated that the carbon measurements from the three types of shisha came to 17 times the normal cigarette limit, 15 times, and 52 times the limit. The self-lighting carbon in both large and small amounts for nicotine measured about one cigarette per shisha, while the natural carbon was the nicotine equivalent of smoking six cigarettes.