Call for fire-safe cigarette

Press, 22 December 1982, Page 16

Call for fire-safe cigarette

PA Washington In the face of protests from the tobacco industry, the United States Congress and a growing number state legislatures are considering requiring cigarettes. that would not burn hot enough or long enough to ignite bedding and upholstery. Cigarettes are the cause of more than a third of all residential fire deaths, according to the United States Fire Administration.

Last year smoking materials ignited 63,518 homes, caused SUS3OS million damage to property, injured 3819 people and killed 2144 others, according to the agency. “Every time there is a big fire caused by cigarettes in a district, we get another sponsor for our bill,” said Joe Moakley. A Democrat, he is sponsoring legislation that would give the Consumer Product Safety Commission authority to issue mandatory standards for a fire-safe cigarette. Hearings on the bill are scheduled for early next year. Scores of patents, dating

from 1854, specify designs for fire-safe cigarettes, but the Tobacco Institute, the industry’s trade association, argues that they are impractical.

“We are not aware of any processes or methods for modification of the cigarette that can be said to represent a real solution,” said the trade group.

At least two commercial brands are relatively safe, however. The National Bureau of Standards and the United States Testing Co., an independent laboratory, in-

dividually determined the relative ’ safety of More, made by the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., and Nat Sherman’s, a specialty cigarette brand made in New York City.

The brands are fire-safe by coincidence, not by design, according to the companies. When R.J. Reynolds discovered in 1977 that More cigarettes tended to go out between puffs, the company adjusted the chemical composition of the cigarette’s paper to keep it burning,

according to David Fishel, a company spokesman. Despite this modification, the More brand still had a high safety rating in the recent laboratory tests. Mr Fishel, said that the company did not recognise More as fire-safe because the cigarette did not extinguish itself consistently. “If a process can be developed to make a cigarette self-extinguish, we will use it, if it does not decrease - cigarette qualities,” he said. ,