Tobacco.org

• Bay Area hooked on hookah 

Across the Bay Area and nation in recent years, hookah lounges have become increasingly popular gathering places for college students too young to drink legally, transplanted Middle Easterners looking to indulge in a familiar pastime and even for veterans of the Iraq war, who learned to enjoy hookahs while overseas. The practice is believed to have originated in India and spread to the Middle East hundreds of years ago.

Hookah lounges in the Bay Area tend to cluster around universities such as Stanford, although there are many in San Francisco - from the Tenderloin to the Haight-Ashbury. High-tech workers and engineers such as Mohammad Aldossary, 25, a Stanford graduate student in petroleum engineering from Saudi Arabia, enjoy them, too.

"It's more fun to be in the social atmosphere here," he said at Da Hookah Spot. "I don't smoke cigarettes, but I smoke from a hookah pipe once or twice a week."

The lounges are often classified as tobacco shops, allowing them to get around California's 1998 statewide ban on smoking in bars. Most cities prohibit the sale of food in such establishments. The sale of nonalcoholic beverages, however, is typically allowed as long as they do not make up a significant portion of revenues, and alcohol is prohibited, according to officials at the city attorney's offices in Palo Alto, Hayward and San Francisco.

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