Editorial: Smoke Without Fires [04/20-3]

Excerpts from: Smoke without fires

Boston Globe [04/19/05]


The most common cause of fatal home fires, a smoldering cigarette, could easily be prevented if lawmakers would simply require the tobacco industry to produce cigarettes that quickly extinguish when they are not being smoked. Congressional legislation to achieve this has never gotten very far, but since last June, all New York state cigarettes have had to meet a ''reduced ignition propensity" standard. Massachusetts legislators should enact a similar bill that is pending on Beacon Hill.

Even before the New York law went into effect, Philip Morris had sold a version of its Merit brand using paper with banded ''speed bumps." These tiny bands have less porosity than regular cigarette paper and retard burning. The new Merits stripped the industry of its claim that it was impossible to produce reduced ignition cigarettes without harming their flavor.

A Harvard School of Public Health study released in January reinforced that point. It found that there was no fall-off in tobacco sales in New York after the companies started selling their products with reduced ignition paper. Retail prices of cigarettes in Albany were found in the study to be comparable to prices in Boston, suggesting that the change did not cause a boost in their cost.

A co-author of the Harvard study, Greg Connolly, said there are insufficient data at this point to determine whether the new cigarettes are actually reducing smoking-caused fire deaths in New York. It could take as long as three years, he said, to collect valid information on that point. The study did detect slightly higher levels of toxic compounds in the smoke of the New York cigarettes.

But any slight increase in the toxicity of cigarette smoke, which is already highly toxic, has to be balanced against the 900 to 1,000 American lives lost annually to fires caused by careless smoking. According to data from the state fire marshal's office, smoking causes more than 1,500 fires a year in this state. In 2001, such fires took 16 lives; in 2002, 19 lives. A cigarette-caused fire that killed a family of four in Westwood in 1979 turned the late congressman Joseph Moakley into a crusader for a safer-cigarettes law in Congress. Congressman Edward Markey of Malden has taken up the cause and plans to introduce a new bill this month.

At some point, as Massachusetts and other states join New York in requiring reduced ignition cigarettes, the industry might actually prefer the uniformity of a federal law and a federal standard. Markey and other supporters of safer cigarettes should make certain that any such standard is rigorous enough to save lives.

Smoking kills in many different ways. Preventing this way requires straightforward changes in cigarettes that are long overdue

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