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Medwakh is five times stronger than tobacco. Photo: SCMP

Arab teens embracing tobacco product five times stronger than regular cigarettes

Despite campaigns on the risks of smoking, teenagers in the United Arab Emirates are turning to a little-known tobacco product five times more potent than cigarettes and said to cause seizures.

AFP

Despite campaigns on the risks of smoking, teenagers in the United Arab Emirates are turning to a little-known tobacco product five times more potent than cigarettes and said to cause seizures.

Omar, an 18-year-old Sudanese student in Abu Dhabi, describes how each hit of medwakh - a legal product inhaled from a small pipe - makes him feel.

"It's a horrible habit. But if I don't do it my head hurts," he said. "I feel I need it."

Omar is not alone in smoking medwakh, which means "dizziness" in Arabic; the product is reportedly popular among young people throughout the United Arab Emirates.

One puff is enough to make the smoker light-headed, or as one 17-year-old ex-smoker who identified himself as 'Clique-C' said he felt "relaxed".

Based on 2013 statistics from the American Cancer Society and the World Lung Foundation, 15.6 per cent of male teenagers smoke tobacco daily in the UAE, as do 18.1 per cent of men.

And while there are no official statistics on the use of medwakh among young people, researchers say the habit is widespread.

"We did a study in [the emirate of] Ajman on schoolchildren and we found that 36 per cent of them were doing medwakh," Rizwana Burhanuddin Shaikh, associate professor at the department of community medicine at the Gulf Medical University, said.

According to Palat Menon, a researcher at the Centre for Advanced Biomedical Research and Innovation in the Gulf Medical University, each gram of medwakh contains around 44 milligrams of nicotine - the equivalent to four or five cigarettes.

"In an average pipe, six milligrams of nicotine get inhaled in 15 to 20 seconds, and that is what gives you a head spin," he said.

Shereena al-Mazroui, section head of non-communicable diseases at the Abu Dhabi Health Authority, said that although little is known about the product, preliminary research suggests a link between medwakh and seizures.

"Some users, after they take the puff, they suffer from seizures, dizziness and faint," she said.

"This phenomenon has spread more within the last 10 years. The tragedy is that it has begun with children."

Medwakh is usually sold cheaply in tobacco shops and grocery stores near schools, in small glass bottles with no packaging or content details.

Its appeal has even become international, with one Emirati expatriate family setting up a medwakh import business in the United States, according to Alan Blum, a tobacco expert at the University of Alabama.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Super-tobacco that has Arab teens hooked
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