Walking through the door, darkness envelopes everything. The only light comes from a blacklight in the corner, tealight lanterns and small cubes of lit charcoal on top of odd-shaped silhouettes in which people are sucking from long tubes. There’s a fruity smell in the air.
This is the atmosphere of Oasis, a hookah bar that opened last semester in Arkadelphia.
According to the owner, Matt Sparks, a 19-year-old University of Arkansas at Fayetteville student, it has become a popular place for college students to frequent.
Sparks said word of mouth advertising has worked well for Oasis and business has been “very good so far.”
Ouachita sophomore Nathan Lockhart said he started coming to Oasis at the beginning of the school year when he heard about it from friends.
“It’s very social,” Lockhart said of Oasis. “There’s not much to do around Arkadelphia. You can just sit down and chill. You don’t even have to smoke if you don’t want to.”
Sophomore Ethan Williams said he also likes to go to Oasis to hang out with friends.
“It’s a place where you can relax and have fun and talk,” Williams said.
For now, only hookah smoking and a few nonalcoholic drinks are on the menu, but Sparks has plans to expand his business.
“I plan on selling cigars by next week and, weather permitting, I should have a pool table in here by Wednesday,” Sparks said.
Sparks said he gets his hookah pipes from Egypt and the blends he puts in them are made of “pure tobacco, flavoring and preservatives.”
Just like any type of smoking that uses tobacco, hookah smoking has some health risks.
Molly Wallace, Ouachita’s on-campus registered nurse, said while a lot of college students think hookah smoking is less dangerous than smoking cigarettes, some research suggests otherwise.
“I’ve read differing statistics on it,” Wallace said. “If you’re doing hookah, it seems to be a longer amount of time as opposed to someone going and getting a cigarette and just doing one cigarette and that’s it. During the hookah sessions there’s longer times that you’re smoking it at one time.”
In a statement on the Mayo Clinic Web site by Edward C. Rosenow III, M.D., said. “According to a World Health Organization advisory, a typical one-hour session of hookah smoking exposes the user to 100 to 200 times the volume of smoke inhaled from a single cigarette.”
However, Sparks believes that hookah smoking is less dangerous because it doesn’t have as many additives as cigarettes.
“It is filtered,” Sparks explained. “It has .05 percent nicotine and .25 percent tar and the water at the base [of the hookah] helps to filter it even more than that. If you’re going to smoke – of course I never would say that smoking is healthy, I think it [hookah] is one of the healthiest things to smoke.”
Wallace disagrees and said the health consequences are “basically the same as smoking cigarettes.”
“It’s not good for you,” Lockhart said. “But it’s not any worse than eating fast food at McDonalds every day. Eating greasy foods all the time isn’t good for you either. They know that is bad for them just like smoking is.”
