By Alexander Liddington-Cox, Lebanese Streets 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. This is the new face of youth smoking in Lebanon and indeed across the Middle East. It’s more girls, it’s more smoke and sadly, in Lebanon, it’s still indoors. “Some of them are in here everyday,” the café’s owner tells Lebanese Streets. “It’s very social and, you know, they’re young.” 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. 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 behaviour of smokers are changing, perhaps for the worse. “When it comes to…
As Health ‘Goes Up in Smoke,’ Lebanon’s Youth Battle Over Tobacco
November 9, 2015
