Abstract
Jurak and moasel are tobacco products that contain, in addition to tobacco, juice of sugar cane, fruits, spices, tar and nicotine. These products are smoked by hubble-bubble, a popular smoking habit in the Middle Eastern and North African countries. Charcoal is put directly on these products during smoking and the smoke passes through water for cooling purpose before it goes to the lung, without filtering. Radioactivity levels were measured in these products, tobacco leaves, charcoal and in cigarette tobacco of most well known brand names by gamma spectrometry system consisting of HPGe detector coupled to a PC-based 8192 channel multichannel analyzer. The average Ra-226 concentrations in jurak, moasel, tobacco leaves, charcoal and cigarette tobacco in Bq/kg were: 3.4, 1.8, 3.2, 2.9 and 7 respectively; that of Th-232 were: 3.8, 2.6, 3.5, 2.2 and 7.8 respectively; that of K-40 were 620, 445, 511, 163 and 876 respectively. It is expected that a jurak smoker inhales 10 times the radioactivity and a moasel smoker twice that compared to a 25 cigarette/d smoker.