Controversy Heats Up Over Safer Smokes

Not long after saying good night to the last dinner guest, the Mitchell family was dead.

Billie Mitchell, 33, was a nonsmoker; his wife Kathi, 27, smoked occasionally. A guest in their Taft, Calif., home may have dropped the cigarette, or maybe it rolled off an ashtray down a crack in the sofa that night in August, 1985. Apparently it smoldered as the household slept, finally starting the fire that killed the couple, their two young children and a visiting cousin.

Bob Calvin, Billie Mitchell’s friend and boss at a local trucking firm, was called the next morning to help identify the bodies.

“After the tears,” Calvin said, “I got sick.”

Toll From Cigarette Fires

He had been through it before. During his childhood in Oregon, Calvin recalled, his two young cousins died and the third was horribly disfigured by a furniture fire from a cigarette dropped at a party.

According to the U.S. surgeon general, cigarette smoking is the country’s leading cause of avoidable deaths, claiming more than 300,000 lives a year from cancer and other diseases. What’s less well-known is that cigarettes also start more fatal fires than any other ignition source, causing about 30% of all fire deaths in this country, according to government studies.

Along with 1,500 to 2,000 deaths per year, cigarette fires are estimated to cause at least 6,000 injuries per year and $400 million in property loss, according to a study by the National Fire Protection Assn.

None for Cigarettes

While there are government safety standards for many items that cigarettes burn, there are none for cigarettes.

That could change after a federal cigarette safety panel, known as the Technical Study Group, makes its final report this fall. The study group, set up by Congress three years ago, has found that certain physical changes--such as looser-packed tobacco--allow a cigarette to go on burning with less chance of starting a fire.

The findings are sure to renew the push in Congress and state legislatures for a fire-resistance standard for cigarettes.

But the industry, which says carelessness is the real issue, plans to be ready. During the last four years, it has built a bridge--really more of a superhighway--to the group most involved in fire safety issues.

In a unique and savvy lobbying campaign, the Tobacco Institute--the political arm of the industry--has provided millions of dollars to fire departments and state and national fire safety groups to develop educational materials and run community fire prevention programs.

The tactic has proved successful. “Between you and me, five years ago I wouldn’t even sit in the same room with people from the Tobacco Institute,” said a former official of a major fire group. According to the institute’s bean count--revealed in an internal memo in mid-1986--the institute was “68% toward our goal of 200 working relationships within the fire community.”

The industry got involved in fire prevention when cigarette legislation started gathering steam. In 1979, after a cigarette fire in his district killed a family of seven, Rep. Joe Moakley (D-Mass.) introduced a bill to require that cigarettes be made to self-extinguish five minutes after left unattended.

The next year, Moakley and Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.), took a different tack, filing bills directing the Consumer Product Safety Commission to come up with a fire resistance standard, or to inform Congress if it found this technically unfeasible.

The safety commission has jurisdiction over about 15,000 products. In the area of fire safety, it has ignition standards for children’s sleepwear, mattresses, carpeting and rugs; and it was responsible for a voluntary standard adopted by the upholstered furniture industry.

But the commission lacks jurisdiction over cigarettes. In 1972, when the commission was created--and again in 1976--Congress specifically barred it from scrutinizing “tobacco or tobacco products,” even though no other agency had that authority.

Americans spent $30 billion a year on cigarettes, and the industry fears any change in cigarette appearance or taste that might affect sales. Although leery of saying so, the industry also is nervous about product liability claims from cigarette fires.

A few such suits have been filed over cigarette fires, and none has been successful. But some legal experts and others believe that a sympathetic plaintiff--such as a burned child--will eventually prevail against the brand linked to a fire, touching off an avalanche of claims.

The industry would be all the more vulnerable if it were shown “that there is a technology for a fire-safe cigarette,” said a former staff member of the Tobacco Institute who would not speak for attribution. “To them, that’s a very, very scary issue.”

Whatever its private legal worries, the industry focused publicly on technical feasibility, contending that a fire-safe cigarette would be unmakeable or unsmokable. “Congress cannot legislate science into existence,” said industry officials, in what became a familiar response to the Moakley-Cranston bills.

The industry further argued that fire-safe smokes, if they could be made, would not burn as thoroughly as current brands--thus delivering more tar, nicotine, and carbon monoxide to the smoker.

But after years of successful resistance, the industry was forced to reassess its stand. Although the bills in Congress were going nowhere, by 1984 cigarette safety legislation was gaining momentum in several states. Federal regulation was certainly preferable to varying rules from state to state.

Completion of Study

So with industry support, Congress passed the Cigarette Safety Act of 1984--calling for a study of the feasibility of making cigarettes with “a reduced propensity to ignite upholstered furniture and mattresses.” State legislators informally agreed to put their bills on hold pending completion of the federal study.

The act created the Technical Study Group--with members from government, health and fire prevention groups, and the cigarette and furniture industries--to direct technical and economic research. The most significant research involved tests on dozens of experimental cigarettes.

The study concluded that thin cigarettes with looser-packed tobacco, wrapped in less porous paper, were considerably more fire-safe than the best commercial brands. Moreover, it said, “some of the best performing experimental cigarettes had per puff tar, nicotine and CO (carbon monoxide) yields comparable to typical commercial cigarettes.”

According to the group’s draft report to Congress, due in final form Oct. 30, “It is technically feasible and may be commercially feasible to develop cigarettes that will have a significantly reduced propensity to ignite upholstered furniture and mattresses.”

Dr. Richard Gann, chief fire scientist with the National Bureau of Standards and study group chairman, said cigarette firms would be vulnerable to lawsuits and state legislation if they disregard the study findings.

The panel’s industry members “are perceptive both about their product and the prevailing climate,” Gann said. “I’m fully confident that they’ll take advantage of the technology that’s being developed by us.”

Yet the industry members contend there are practical problems with the cigarettes that tested fire-safe. Smoking a cigarette as thin and loosely packed as the best experimental one would be like sucking a thick milkshake through a straw, Dr. Alexander Spears, executive vice president with Lorillard Inc., recently told the study panel.

“I don’t think you could give them (the experimental cigarettes) away,” remarked Dr. Preston Leake of American Tobacco Co.

Meanwhile, the industry has sought to win friends, or at least neutralize foes, in preparation for renewed debate in Congress. In recent years, the Tobacco Institute has lavished grants and contracts on individual fire officials, state and county fire agencies, and virtually every key national group involved in fire safety, including the National Fire Protection Assn., the International Society of Fire Service Instructors and the National Volunteer Fire Council. The grants have paid for conferences and production of fire safety curricula aimed at high school students, senior citizens and the handicapped.

More than 100 municipal fire departments, including those in the biggest U.S. cities, have also received grants, principally of audio-visual equipment and educational material for fire prevention workshops. The industry contribution is “in the millions of dollars,” said Institute Vice President Pete Sparber, who would not give a specific figure.

The industry has further endeared itself to firefighters by lobbying to save the U.S. Fire Administration--a perennial target of the Reagan Administration’s budget knife.

Some literature prepared by the institute is reticent about the toll from cigarette fires, and more expansive about other fire causes. But despite its political agenda, the institute has won considerable gratitude within the fire service.

Tobacco industry support has “been tremendous for us,” said Jim Monihan, chairman of the National Volunteer Fire Council. “We appreciate it, but we also appreciate the fact that there’s no strings attached to it.”

“Doing reasonable things with reasonable people is good politics,” the institute’s Peter Sparber observed. “We are acting in good faith. If that counts for anything, we should benefit.”