Disc jockey Anthony Defilippo’s chocolate-meets-vanilla hookah, called "Yoo-hoo-hoo," hits the spot for UF students craving flavored tobacco.
Hookah has been gaining popularity in college cities across the country, according to the most recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report on hookah, published last month. Gainesville is no exception, with three hookah lounges, along with a store that sells personal hookahs, on University Avenue alone.
But the CDC’s report said even after the tobacco has passed through the water in a hookah, the smoke still contains cancer-causing toxins.
Alachua County Department of Health policy program manager Andrew Romero said hookah is a relatively new trend in Gainesville. At the moment, he said the department is still figuring out how to denormalize hookah.
He said hookah bars continuing to open near campus will come down to students taking a stand for their health.
"Students and the university will see this as an issue," he said. "(The hookah businesses are) taking college students and selling them a product that isn’t good for them."
Defilippo also works at a hookah lounge on University Avenue. He said 80 percent of his customers are students.
On the weekends, he said about 150 students come to his Middle-Eastern-style lounge to smoke water pipes that filter tobacco. He said the lounge is almost always packed.
"People prefer this (hookah) to cigarettes and cigars," Defilippo said.
At the beginning of this month, Mystic Tobacco hookah lounge at 1219 W. University Ave. opened under new management. The business was previously managed poorly, said the new owner Ricardo Morales. Now, about 90 percent of its customers are college students, he said.
At 1029 W. University Ave., Sheesha’s student customers make up about 40 percent of business, the owner Amit Patel said.
Modern Age Tobacco at 1122 W. University Ave. declined to comment about how many students buy hookah products from the shop.
UF linguistics and East Asian languages and literatures junior Jacob Rieker said he smoked at a hookah bar close to Ohio State University, where he studied before transferring to UF last Spring.
"I was studying Arabic at the time, so I went for the culture, too," the 20-year-old said.
He doesn’t smoke as often now, but he said he likes smoking to relax after exams.
Auburn University alumnus Joseph West, 21, said he smokes hookah socially about once or twice a month. He has visited Kava Bar and Hookah Lounge at 1007 W. University Ave.
"The most fun is the taste and the flavors," he said.
Taylor Ratcliff, a 23-year-old who will return to UF as a history senior in the spring, blows out Gator Mist flavored smoke at Sheesha on Oct. 7, 2015. Ratcliff said he used smoke at Sheesha twice a week with friends, but hadn’t been back in a while because he purchased his own hookah.
