Interest In Pipes Follows Trend Of Star-Borne Cigars

Smoke a cigar these days and you can pretend you’re one of the beautiful people such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Demi Moore. Now a new smoking minitrend offers the opportunity to emulate the likes of Bing Crosby, Fred MacMurray and Frosty the Snowman.

Pipes are making a small comeback, apparently following the smoky trail of upscale cigars.

“I think a lot of it is cigar smokers coming into pipe smoking,” says Chuck Stanion, associate editor of Pipes and Tobaccos magazine. “Pipe smoking was very, very popular in the 1940s, then it dropped, starting in the 1970s. Now it’s been increasing again, and I think it’s going to continue to increase.”

The parent company of Stanion’s magazine recently commissioned a market survey to track the growth in sales, which is happening mainly among specialty tobacco shops. Results showed an 8.4 percent increase in the sale of premium tobacco from 1995 to 1996. A similar increase has been projected for 1997.

The magazine, based in Raleigh, N.C., was launched about a year ago in response to the renewed interest. Circulation now stands at 52,000.

Still, despite the surge, pipe smoking remains a mere shadow of its former self. It hit its peak in the 1960s, when pipe smokers consumed more than 50 million pounds of tobacco yearly. In 1996, consumption stood at just 7.2 million pounds, according to Norman Sharp, president of the Pipe Tobacco Council.

And nothing has changed in terms of the health risks posed by pipes.

People who smoke pipes, according to an American Lung Association report, “have much higher death rates than non-smokers do.”

Though pipe smokers who don’t inhale may not risk their health as much as cigarette smokers, the organization reports that both groups share the same risk for developing cancers of the mouth, throat, voice box, esophagus and bladder.

Pipe aficionados, however, resist any comparison with cigarette smokers.

“Pipe smoking, per se, isn’t the healthiest thing in the world, but the pipe does have less of a health risk” than cigarettes, says Sami Mikhail, a founding member of the Dallas-Fort Worth Area Pipe Smokers group.

Mikhail, a 35-year-old Dallas software engineer, began smoking a pipe in college.

“I was a nonsmoker,” he says. “I picked it up, tried it and got hooked on the whole mystique.”

He doesn’t like to call his activity a “habit.” To him, it’s much more of a “pastime.”

Once a month, he and the other members commune at a barrestaurant that caters to the cigar crowd. The group started with six members about a year ago, and it has since grown to 18 regulars, with about a dozen more on the mailing list. (All are men; area pipe stores report only a handful of women are customers.)

Price is what’s drawing cigar and cigarette smokers to pipes, say Dallas-area retailers. One premium cigar easily can cost $10; Mikhail buys tobacco in specialty shops for about $25 a pound - enough to last him “a good six months.”

Good pipes cost in the $30 to $60 range.

And then, of course, there’s the aroma, which Hamilton contends offends fewer secondhand smokers than cigarettes do.