Save Hookah Culture - A Responsible Manufacturer's Point Of View. Featuring George Jonson of Regal Hookah.
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 for Video:
My name is George Jonson. I have been in the hookah industry for the better part of two decades. I am the owner of a small, domestic US hookah pipe manufacturing (company), called the Regal Hookah. When I want people to understand hookah, I want them to understand that we are an old timey tradition, almost in the same respect as Grandpa’s briar pipe. Those wooden pipes that you would sit on the side of a fireplace at the end of a long day once in a while and smoke a cherry aroma pipe tobacco.
So given that it’s not travel-friendly, it requires 20-30 minutes of setup time between lighting charcoal and packing the bowl and having access to water, it is not something you could do on your lunch break. You’re not sitting there at the corporate office saying I’m going to go outside and smoke hookah. It doesn’t happen. It only happens at the end of the day when you have time to unwind. It’s not for rushed people.
The FDA also deemed hookah, in one of Gottlieb’s reports, as a minor influence and not a part of the epidemic. The state of California had a flavor ban in Sacramento at the beginning part of this year that we worked very hard to convince Senators and Assembly persons that hookah is different and that we are a cultural expression. And they listen to us, and they heard us, and we got a carve out under a cultural exemption for hookah in California.
We’re more organized now. It seems insurmountable like whack a mole where this city is going and this city pops up, but we’re together now. We’re coming together, and we need everybody’s support. We need people to join Hookah Chamber of Commerce. We need people to get engaged, actively, politically on social media. However they can. There’s still work to be done and I hope that we’ll be successful. I have more faith in us being successful in granting a cultural exemption for traditional hookah tobacco.