A shisha is meant to be shared with several friend. You inhale a few puffs, talk with everybody, inhale a few more, try to look cool making smoke rings, clean the mouthpiece and pass to your friend to the left.
Last time I smoked a cachimba we were six persons and a piece of shisha tobacco the size of thumb lasted about an hour.
There are people who smoke the whole shisha alone? Yes, but there are also people who eat a three foot wheel of pizza alone…
The model is based on data gathered from smoking sessions of 30 min or
longer duration from 52 smoker volunteers using a differential pressure
puff topography instrument, as well as anonymous visual observations of
56 smokers in the same cafe. Results showed that the “average”
water-pipe cafe smoking session consists of one hundred seventy-one
530-ml puffs of 2.6-s duration at a frequency of 2.8 puffs/min. The
implications of this comparatively high-intensity puffing regimen on the
production of toxic smoke constituents are discussed.
Apparently, the volume of smoke for the average smoker in the cafe in a 40 minute session is equivalent to between 100-200 cigarettes. That’s a lot of smoke by anyone’s measure.
Although, since it’s a cafe, it probably is a higher pressure situation than, for instance, chilling at a friend’s house, which could increase smoking behavior.