Palmer said the Health Department is supporting bills in the General Assembly that would require hookah bars to register with the state on Jan. James Palmer, spokesman for the state Department of Health, said that “adding the exemptions” to the state’s no-smoking law, allowing for such things as hookah, “was not an effort supported, and we would like to see them addressed by the legislature.” Health officials, including the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have made clear they see tobacco smoked in a hookah as a health risk. Paré, the Providence public safety commissioner. The police acted after finding social media advertisements suggesting people could smoke in places that authorities suspected didn’t have the necessary license, according to Steven M.
#HOOKAH LOUNGE RHODE ISLAND CRACK#
The city began to crack down on hookah bars after 2012 when the City Council and Mayor Angel Taveras, citing health interests, passed laws banning sales of flavored tobacco products. Neil Downing, of the Division of Taxation, said there is nothing in the state law that gives a set time period for an establishment to correct the problem. The notified city or municipality can then fine the business and/or revoke the business’s license. The Department of Health, after it receives two complaints, notifies the town solicitor. If a hookah bar doesn’t meet the 51-percent threshold, the state tax division notifies the state Department of Health, which then sends a letter to the establishment that says it isn’t complying with the law. If a business with a smoking lounge opens, let’s say, midyear, it is given a year and a half of operating before it must submit its first affidavit of tobacco sales to the Division of Taxation.
#HOOKAH LOUNGE RHODE ISLAND LICENSE#
Then the business must go to the city Board of Licenses to ask for a tobacco license (which also covers hookah smoking). First, a business must file an affidavit with the state Division of Taxation every year attesting that at least 51 percent of the business’s annual revenue comes from tobacco. To be allowed to establish a “smoking lounge,” there is one time-consuming and complex path. It appears that some hookah bars open without regard for any state regulation.Ī 2005 Rhode Island law banned indoor smoking - with some exceptions. Rhode Island’s capital city has experienced a profusion of bars, lounges and restaurants with hookah since the mid-2000s.īut unlike these Federal Hill establishments, which abide by state law that allows them to offer hookah, some others in Providence have been hauled before the city Board of Licenses for doing so illegally. Two hours later, they drive off in SUVs, one a Porsche Cayenne.Ī visitor seeking Federal Hill’s traditional Little Italy may wonder if they’ve arrived in Little Lebanon.
Every so often each uses a hookah barely noticeable in the fine-dining atmosphere.
Near the window, a mellow fellow in from Detroit on business, whose favorite hookah flavor is pumpkin pie, thumbs through his phone, uses a hookah and declares the place “very chill.”Ī short walk down Atwells Avenue, four businessmen dine at a window table in Opa, where the bar surface alternately glows red, blue, green and gold. But around the room, most of the bubbles are burbling through hookah pipes, not in glasses at the bar.Ī couple at a corner table - he’s in jacket and tie, she’s in formal dress - clink glasses and share a pipe. PROVIDENCE - “One Bourbon, One Scotch and One Beer” boogies out of a sound system inside Nara in the popular Federal Hill district one night.
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