Save Hookah Culture - A Legal Professional's Point Of View. Featuring Rima Khoury, General Counsel for Fumari.
Stand together to preserve hookah through informing lawmakers of our cultural traditions. We can prevent our hookah culture from becoming collateral damage amidst the challenges to resolve the epidemic of minors smoking.
Transcript:
My name is Rima Khoury. I’m General Counsel for Fumari, who is a member of the Hookah Chamber of Commerce. To start, hookah has been around for hundreds of years and there’s many different cultures that partake in hookah practice, including Arabs, Persians, Turkish and Indians, all of which these cultures have immigrated to the United States and it has even grown.
This is an average or medium sized hookah. And as you can see, it’s rather large. They can range from one foot to four feet tall. To set something like this up, takes 15 to 30 minutes. The hookah is definitely not something that you can easily fit in your pocket or your backpack and smoke it in the bathroom at recess, at school. It’s even difficult to smoke it at home because it’s not only large, but, you know, it’s not something that even during the setup you could hide from your parents.
Recently, the FDA had included in their draft guidance that hookah does not appear to be an issue with this teen crisis, mainly because it’s not easily portable. So this is not the issue that is in the limelight right now. Hookah is not the issue.
The Hookah Chamber of Commerce is a collection of manufacturers, retailers, hookah lounges, consumers and hookah enthusiasts that have come together to unite and to help educate and bring awareness to hookah and our cultures.
It’s very important for us to stand together now more than ever, while these flavor bans are happening and sweeping across our state. And if in the case of a complete flavor tobacco ban, we ask for a hookah exemption.