Smoke Screen

Phase One: Cigar smoking is something Grandpa does at Friday night poker games.

Phase Two: The pastime gets bigger and hipper. Trendy types are lighting up at fund-raisers and night clubs.

Suddenly, stogies are everywhere. Demi Moore posed with one for the cover of Cigar Aficionado magazine. (Some of the magazine’s subscribers recently paid $450 for a “Big Smoke” Las Vegas weekend.)

And recently, it was even possible to catch a cigar party at the gym. Sports Club / LA in West Los Angeles hosted a Cigar Night, charging members $25 to sample cigars on the sun deck.

While cigarette smokers remain society’s pariahs, sneaking smokes whenever they can, cigar smokers often land on the see-and-be-seen party list, not garnering nearly the vitriol as their cigarette-puffing counterparts.

And why should they, say stogie fans. After all, theirs is the safer smoke. Their rationales: “I don’t inhale” and “I don’t smoke that many.”

But are they kidding themselves?

Yes, say physicians and researchers.

“There are significant risks involved with tobacco use in any form,” says Dr. Albert Lim, an internist and pulmonary specialist at Kaiser Permanente, Woodland Hills.

“Cigar smokers have a lower risk and a lower incidence of heart and lung disease than cigarette smokers,” says Dr. Vanessa Tatum, an Inglewood pulmonologist and member of the board of directors for the American Lung Assn. of Los Angeles County. But the key word, she says, is “lower.”

Cigar smokers have a three-times-higher rate of lung cancer than nonsmokers, according to a study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Even though cigar smokers generally do not inhale, they still inhale some of the wafting smoke, Tatum explains.

“Any form of tobacco smoke will reduce the lung’s ability to clear mucus and will also stimulate mucus production,” Lim says.

Cigar smokers also risk getting cancers of the gum, lip and other oral sites. The risk of dying from laryngeal, oral and esophageal cancers is four to 10 times greater for cigar smokers than for nonsmokers, according to the American Cancer Society, citing a 1993 study in the European Journal of Cancer.

“Treatments can be horribly disfiguring for cancers of the mouth, throat and larynx,” adds Dr. Stephen M. Greenberg, a diagnostic radiologist at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles. That’s because excision of the cancer is often the treatment.

Smokers of cigars, as well as cigarettes, often point to the exceptions--people who smoke to a ripe old age and get away with it.

In fact, if you look at the number of cancers associated with smoking and the number of people who smoke, “most get away with not having a fatal disease,” Lim says.

“But turn those statistics around,” he suggests. Of the people who do get lung and other smoking-related cancers, most have smoked. And they could have prevented their cancers. While the risk of lung cancer, for instance, is viewed by some cigar fans as “only” three times higher than nonsmokers, Lim says “any time you can minimize your risk for a fatal disease” it is wise to do so.

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Given all these risks, why the cigar boom?

So far this year, cigar sales are up 16%. The typical average starting age has dipped to the mid-20s. And women, once one-tenth of 1% of cigar smokers, now make up 2% to 5% of the nation’s 10 million cigar fans.

“It’s pretty much my only vice,” says Ron Hinson, 38, a studio set painter who stopped by Liberson’s Gourmet International Tobaccos in Toluca Lake recently to treat himself to a $6 Royal Jamaican to smoke during his 90-minute commute home. He exercises and eats healthfully, but looks forward to two or three cigars a week.

At play, too, might be an attempt to recapture the pleasant feeling of being with Grandpa--the stereotypical cigar smoker--during childhood. “A lot of times [what is] chic blends the new with the nostalgic,” says Dr. Mark Goulston, a Santa Monica psychiatrist.

Relaxation is yet another draw, say smokers like Ed Kolpin, 87, who owns the Tinder Box Wilshire in Santa Monica and smokes a cigar a day. “Cigars are anti-stress,” he says.

Maybe for the smoker, but not for nonsmokers, who are becoming more vocal about secondhand cigar smoke.

One longtime member at Sports Club / LA lodged a complaint with the club and the American Lung Assn. of Los Angeles County before Cigar Night. She was concerned that smoke would drift into workout areas. The lung association sent a letter to General Manager Dan Miller, encouraging him to cancel the event.

In a response, Miller said the Cigar Night, held at the request of members, will not be ongoing. About 150 members and guests attended.

Restaurant and bar workers are also becoming more vocal about cigar smoke in their workplace, says Elva Yanez, policy manager at Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights in Berkeley.

One of them is Matt Gamer, 26, a chef at a Costa Mesa bar and grill. Adversely affected by secondhand cigarette smoke, he is finding cigar smoke even more irritating.

“It’s the difference between a little bit of coughing and having my lungs burn for three days,” he says.

For good reason, says Jim Repace, a physicist with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency who emphasized he was not speaking as an agency spokesman.

“Emissions are much greater for cigars than for cigarettes. A cigar is bigger than a cigarette, so it is going to emit about five times as much tar as a cigarette. An average cigar would emit about 25 times as much carbon monoxide as a cigarette.”

He compares enclosed areas with many cigar smokers to “gas chambers.”

Public health officials hope more people will follow the lead of talk show host David Letterman. He recently chucked what he described as a 20-cigar-a-day habit. Letterman quipped that he was smoking stogies “like gum.”

Letterman told fellow talk show host Larry King that he quit because he was “beginning to hear and see some things that indicate to me that maybe tobacco smoke is not that good for you.”