Smokers burned up over ‘fire-safe cigarettes’

Alex Johnson Reporter • Profile

Josh Hubbard examined a cigarette from the pack he had just bought. They were different.

“It’s got little rings around it in a couple of spots,” he said, standing in the parking lot of Butch’s Corner Food Market in Williamsburg, Ky.

Those rings are thick bands of low-permeability paper, and they are rapidly appearing on cigarettes across the country. The idea is that if you set down your smoke — or fall asleep in bed with it still lighted — the cigarette will extinguish itself when the flame reaches one of the rings.

In effect, the rings act as speed bumps. To keep a cigarette lighted, you have to keep puffing. When you stop, it goes out by itself in about 5 minutes.

Fire officials and public health watchdogs say the self-extinguishing cigarettes are a good idea — so good that in the last six years, 37 states and the District of Columbia have enacted laws requiring that they be sold; in five other states, such laws are under consideration or await the governor’s signature.

There are no reliable statistical data demonstrating that fire-safe cigarette laws actually reduce fires. The National Fire Injury Reporting System relies on local fire departments to determine the cause of fires and to report the data. 

A dearth of hard data
And injuries and deaths due to fires began declining for several years before such laws came on the scene, making researchers reluctant to declare any cause-and-effect relationship.

But fire investigators and public safety officials point to research conducted by the Harvard University School of Public Health, which found that only 10 percent of cigarettes sold in New York, the first state to enact a safer cigarette law, burned down to the filter if left unattended, compared to 99.8 percent of cigarettes without the bands.

Common sense dictates that cigarette are less likely to cause fires if they snuff themselves out, advocates say, meaning fewer deaths, injuries and property loss. John R. Hall, director of fire analysis and research for the National Fire Protection Association, projects that if fire-safe cigarettes were available in all 50 states, about 1,000 lives would be saved each year nationwide.

“We’re not trying to tell someone they can’t smoke. That’s not what we’re doing,” said Laura Mason, the deputy fire marshal of Tyler, Texas, who supports the state's law mandating fire-safe cigarettes. “What we want to do is not have to go and explain to family members and friends why these people died in a fire from something we found a way to make safer.”

New smokes ‘taste like crap’
Side by side with a traditional cigarette, you can’t tell much difference. But on the box, the letters FSC above the bar code denote Fire Safe Cigarettes; in some states, it’s RFP for Reduced Fire Propensity.

“I do understand why they did it, as a safety precaution,” said Katie West, another customer at Butch’s, who said the new cigarettes were a good idea. But there’s one big problem, she said: “The cigarettes don’t taste near as good as they used to.”

And that’s the rub. Asked to rate the new cigarettes, many smokers said they left an unpleasant coppery taste in the mouth.

An msnbc.com-NBC News special report Alex Johnson is a reporter for msnbc.com. The following NBC stations contributed to this report: KBJR of Duluth, Minn.; KETK of Tyler, Texas; KFYR of Bismarck, N.D.; KSL of Salt Lake City, Utah; KWES of Midland, Texas; WBIR of Knoxville, Tenn.; WICR of Erie, Pa.; and WPSD of Paducah, Ky.

“It’s nasty,” said Jewell Robertson of Paducah, Ky. Or as Hubbard put it, they “taste like crap.”

And for many smokers, the  feature that fire officials like is a pain in the neck.

“They constantly go out, and I have to relight them all the time,” said Kathy McDaniel of Midland, Texas.

“If you’re not smoking on it regularly, like 30 to 35 seconds, it goes out pretty quick,” said Ron Calkins of Erie, Pa. “You have to light them every once in a while.”

Victor Freeman, the owner of Butch’s, said his customers were annoyed with having to continually relight their cigarettes, but he’s found a way to capitalize.

“We’ll sell more lighters,” he said.

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