Smoking shisha tobacco through a hookah is nothing new. Its historic popularity has caused it to be included in television shows and films. Have you ever noticed Jabba the Hutt smoking out of a hookah in Return of the Jedi? Of course, the Hookah-Smoking Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland is a more well-known popular culture reference to hookah smoking in general and perhaps shisha tobacco in particular. Nonetheless, for all the comparisons between shisha tobacco and traditional cigarettes, the former edges out the latter in one aspect: flavor variety.
Why Shisha Tobacco has More Flavor Variety
Traditional cigarettes used to be available in more flavors. The selection ranged anywhere between candy and fruit flavors to cola flavored and coffee flavored. However, aside from the smoker-favored menthol, many of these selections where banned by the FDA. Still, the FDA didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to ban most flavors in traditional cigarettes without some sort of rhyme or reason. This decision was made in order to make traditional cigarettes less appealing to youths. According to FDA studies and research, not only are flavored cigarettes more likely to be used by younger smokers, but tobacco-industry memos illustrate that different flavors were made to specifically target younger, potential smokers. However, shisha tobacco has yet to be limited by the FDA in terms of flavor variety.
Now it is all up to them as to how they want to look at the variety of flavors in hookah because they are extremely popular with the youth that cannot exist without it with most of them giving up smoking cigarettes and taking to traditional ones in a big way and that’s just for the flavors as though they are eating their favorite chocolates so FDA had better come up with some unique idea like Shisha for sale or something of the sort as flavoring them is quite acceptable.
A Hypothesis on Why Shisha Tobacco Flavors Remain at Large
While plain-flavored shisha tobacco does exist, the variety of flavors it comes in is more standard than the non-flavored variety. The different flavors of shisha tobacco were not created to target a younger demographic. They were created for the general hookah smoking community. As such, banning flavored shisha would be nearly equivalent to banning hookah smoking entirely. I’m not sure the FDA wants that sort of backslash.
