well-being and nicotine

As much as I love Egypt, I have to admit that I always feel a profound sense of well-being when outside of the country, such as now. And the reason seems to be obvious: that accursed water pipe.

Half of everything people say about this artifact is just random guesswork. You’ll hear some doctors say they are “much worse” than cigarettes, while other doctors prescribe them as safe cigarette-quitting mechanisms. Without having studied the problem, I can take a guess at why one or the other might be worse. The shisha puts out an awful lot of smoke. The smoke is really thick. But you don’t smoke it all day the way you would with cigarettes, and you don’t really inhale. My guess would be that oral cancer is the big risk with shisha, as opposed to lung cancer.

But the other thing I can’t figure out, and which no one can explain to me, is whether it’s truly a physical addiction or just a psychological one. There is evidence on both sides. On the one hand, there’s no question that you get a big buzz from the shisha. It has to be the case that a lot of nicotine is reaching you. One day during my first year in Egypt, I smoked around 12 of them in one day for various accidental reasons, and felt nearly insane by the end of that day. So there was definitely a large quantity of chemicals involved in that case, and in more moderate cases as well.

On the other hand… I have always detested cigarettes, and still do. In Europe, I feel as little temptation to buy a pack of cigarettes to fill the shisha emptiness as I would to eat a big thick steak or do a cocaine deal. Nor do I go through nicotine withdrawal symptoms when outside of Egypt; there’s just an immediate sense of physical well-being, almost overnight. So I can’t figure out what it all means, and as mentioned earlier, doctors seem to speak almost at random (and against one another) when they speak about shisha, so I wouldn’t trust what any of them said anyway.

But of course, the problem is easily solved by just not smoking those things anymore. I’ve quit 6 or 7 times, the last time (in November/December) so easily that I didn’t desire it even once for 6 weeks. But when you get bored or overworked, old habits come back easily.

I was glad to see that the most conveniently located places in Paris all closed down. It takes a certain amount of work now to go looking through neighborhoods for those places. But in Cairo there are hundreds of them within walking distance of home, so the burden is always on me to quash the habit.

Then why even start? Because the apple shisha tastes very good, for one thing. For another thing, it’s a fun excuse to hang out in “local” places. Of course, you could always do that and just drink tea. But to do that I’d have to pick new places where the waiters aren’t used to serving me the water pipe along with the drink.