The World Will be a Better Place Without the Arguileh Cafe

It’s a symbol of laziness, wastefulness and ignorance and a bane on public health. I will shed no tears for the demise of this horrible institution.

I don’t have anything against the Arguileh. My mom smokes it and I have written an entire post about the place of the arguileh in Lebanese hearts and culture. But an arguileh cafe, as a place where people hang around doing nothing but smoking for hours, strikes me as a sad, pointless and insidiously harmful social ill.

A ban, and a reaction

As many of you know by now, a ban on smoking in public places will start on Monday, September the 3rd in Lebanon. One of the loudest voices complaining about it is that of arguileh cafe owners. The Syndicate of Owners of Restaurants, Cafes, Nightclubs and Pastries is concerned that the ban will hit them significantly and may drive some of them to shut down.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that we woke up one day in Lebanon and all arguileh cafes were gone. Will that be a bad thing? In my opinion, even if shutting them down costs thousands of jobs, society will be better off without them.

Bubbly Tyranny

Think of what an arguileh cafe is: It’s a place where people go, pay around $7 and spend 4 hours doing nothing but smoking and perhaps playing cards. It is so cheap (especially when many people share the same arguileh) that cash-strapped teenagers and young adults are increasingly making them their meeting and socializing areas. The problem is: Non-smoking youngsters are peer-pressured into spending a lot of time in such toxic environments to avoid isolation, and many times they take a “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach and become smokers themselves. The result is this crazy perception that the Arguileh is the cool thing to do nowadays.

The young ones are giving up things like sports, dancing in clubs and working, all for the sake of a state of sedation where they sit around, smoke and stare at each other. This creates a vicious cycle where the Arguileh cafes multiply and mushroom everywhere. In Tripoli, things are so bad that even fancy restaurants and coffee shops are feeling pressured to offer arguilehs or they’ll lose business. There is literally not a single place in Tripoli where a non-smoker can go to socialize without breathing other people’s poisons.

It would be okay if people were paying the real price of the arguileh (ie including health care costs of exposure to smoke and the lowered productivity of sitting for hours doing nothing), but people are lured into this honey-trap by a false and misleading value proposition (7$ for 4 hours of fun). As for those “jobs” the syndicate is mourning, what kind of jobs are these? Spending twelve hours in a closed space with smokers, doing menial work, earning minimum wage and getting no health insurance for that cancer they will eventually get. Is that really something we should be sad about losing?

Ok, maybe just a little tear

All that said, I understand that the proliferation of the arguileh cafes is the result of, not the cause of economic inactivity. I also understand that in many cases, bad jobs remain better than no jobs at all, and that socializing with people is better than staying at home and doing nothing. But all in all, I think the world will be a better place without the arguileh cafe.