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Fire-Safe Cigarettes

Cigarettes are the leading cause of fatal home fires in the United States.
Every year there are approximately 130,000 smoking-related fires which kill nearly 900 Americans. These fires also injure thousands more and cause billions of dollars in property damage. About one-fourth of all fire deaths can be traced to smoking materials.1
Fires caused by cigarettes disproportionately affect the elderly, poor and disabled.
Senior citizens are slower than others to identify smoke alarms and evacuate their homes, making them almost forty percent of smoking fire fatalities. For similar reasons, 30 percent of those who die from smoking-material fires have physical limitations or disabilities.2 Furthermore, individuals living below the poverty line are 50 percent more likely than others to smoke, making them especially prone to harm.3
One-quarter of these victims did not cause the fires themselves.
Of the approximately 900 who die each year, more than 200 are innocent bystanders. Many victims are children or other nonsmokers put in the line of fire by parents, spouses and neighbors.4
There is a much safer alternative.
Cigarette-makers currently manufacture “fire-safe” or “fire-retardant” cigarettes for sale in New York and other states. Fire-safe cigarettes are designed to be much less likely to ignite furniture or mattresses when carelessly discarded. Such cigarettes have a number of very small and inexpensive improvements, most notably thin bands of less-porous paper at strategic junctures. These bands tend to extinguish the cigarette if it is left unpuffed. A 2005 study by the Harvard University School of Public Health showed that fire-safe cigarettes were 90 percent less likely than traditional cigarettes to burn their full lengths when left unattended.5
The New York Fire Safety Standards for Cigarettes have saved lives.
Authorities in New York worked with both manufacturers and consumer product safety experts over a period of years to design their standards for fire-safe cigarettes. The standards went into effect on June 28, 2004 and quickly proved their effectiveness. While deaths in New York from cigarette-related fires averaged 42 per year between 2000 and 2002, such deaths quickly declined to 28 in 2005.6
States have acted on fire-safe cigarettes because the federal government has not.
Although the technology to produce fire-safe cigarettes has been available for more than a decade, the tobacco industry has refused to utilize it. Fire-safe cigarette legislation has been introduced in every Congress since 1999, but tobacco industry lobbying has blocked its passage. The federal Consumer Product Safety Commission, which would have mandated fire-safe cigarettes years ago, is forbidden by law from regulating tobacco products.
Six states have enacted laws mandating fire-safe cigarettes.
New York enacted its law in 2000 and it took effect in 2004. California and Vermont passed their statutes in 2005, and Illinois, Massachusetts and New Hampshire enacted similar legislation in 2006. Over 25 percent of Americans live in states that mandate fire-safe cigarettes.
Fire-safe cigarette legislation has not affected revenues from state tobacco taxes.
The average monthly New York cigarette and tobacco products tax revenue from July 2004 through November 2004 was virtually unchanged. So too were tobacco sales.7
Endnotes
  1. John Hall, “The Smoking-Material Fire Problem,” Coalition for Fire Safe Cigarettes, 2006.
  2. John Hall et. al, “Behavioral Mitigation of Smoking Fires Through Strategies Based on Statistical Analysis,” United States Fire Administration, 2003.
  3. Centers For Disease Control, “Tobacco Information and Prevention Source,” December 2005.
  4. Coalition for Fire Safe Cigarettes, “What is a fire-safe cigarette?” 2006.
  5. Hillel Alpert et al., “The Effect of the New York State Cigarette Fire Safety Standard on Ignition Propensity. Smoke Toxicity and the Consumer Market,” Harvard University School of Public Health, January 2005.
  6. Michael Gormley, “First Year of ‘Fire-Safe Cigarette Law Yields Fewer Deaths,” Associated Press, September 2005.
  7. “The Effect of the New York State Cigarette Fire Safety Standard on Ignition Propensity. Smoke Toxicity and the Consumer Market.”
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