Smoke'um Iffen You Got'um

More and more teens appear to be spending their high school years in a fog.

According to a new study published in the journal Pediatrics, nearly one in five U.S. students availed themselves of a hookah in the last year.

The research suggests smoking from a hookah — essentially a water pipe that uses charcoal to heat up tobacco, called shisha — is among the very hottest high school trends.

Data for the study came from the University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future survey — which suggests hookah usage among high-school seniors in the past year rose to 21 per cent.

Which could spell a heap of health issues — especially with prevailing attitudes that the hookah is somehow less harmful than cigarettes.

"The fact is, studies from Mayo Clinic show that, if anything, you get more exposure than cigarette smoking by smoking hookah, and the water in the hookah actually does not necessarily filtrate all these poisons," Dr. Zyad Kafri, a hematologist-oncologist at St. John Providence Hospital, told CBS affiliate, WWJ Detroit. "And in general you get more exposure to toxic chemicals than cigarette smoking."

The likeliest candidates for taking up the pipe? Males, people who lived in the city and those with more disposable income, the study notes.

Kids, apparently, are drawn to the smooth taste of the flavoured tobacco.

A hookah (Persian: قلیان ) ‒ also known as a waterpipe, narghile, arghila, qalyān, or shiska is a single or multi-stemmed instrument for vaporizing and smoking flavored tobacco called shisha in which the vapor or smoke is passed through a water basin ‒ often glass-based ‒ before inhalation. 

The origin of the waterpipe is from the time of the Safavid dynasty in thePersian empire which extended into India to where it also spread during that time. The hookah or Argyleh soon reached Egypt and the Levant during the Ottoman dynasty where it became very popular and where the mechanism was later perfected.

The word hookah is a derivative of "huqqa", an Arabic term. Outside its native region, smoking the hookah has gained popularity in North America, South America, Europe, Australia, Southeast Asia, Tanzania, and South Africa, largely due to immigrants from the Levant, where it is especially popular, who introduce it to younger people.