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David Bridge

Fire-safe cigarettes

Back in the days when you could still smoke at your desk, upholstery industry officials were hoping the government would require self-extinguishing cigarettes so they wouldn’t have to worry so much about flammability standards for sofas and chairs.

They’re coming closer to getting their wish.

A constant fear has been that the federal government, in order to reduce deaths from cigarette upholstery fires, would enact legislation demanding fire-safe materials for upholstery.

But the federal government, notably the Consumer Product Safety Commission, has been diddling around with proposals for the last 20 years — and probably will be doing the same years from now.

So states have stepped in to fill the void. Even cigarette companies are beginning to cooperate.

What they’re doing is laws to make cigarettes safer and less likely to catch a sofa or chair on fire.

So far, four states — New York, California, Vermont and Oregon — have laws in effect. And another 16 states have passed legislation and will be putting laws in effect either next year or in 2009. Even tobacco-growing states like North Carolina and Kentucky are jumping in.

According to the Coalition for Fire-Safe Cigarettes, a proponent of the laws, 52% of the U.S. population is now or soon will be protected by fire-safe cigarette laws. Fire-safe cigarettes use extra paper bands or “speed bumps” that extinguish when no one puffs on them.

Even Reynolds American, maker of Winston and other popular brands, said it will convert all its products to fire-resistant paper by the end of 2009.

The early fathers of the Upholstered Furniture Action Council (the industry’s voluntary fire police) would be so happy. The call for cigarette laws used to come up at UFAC meetings, with proponents hoping the government would put the heat on the cigarette industry and take it off upholstery.

The Coalition for Fire-Safe Cigarettes says that in the past two decades, fires caused by smoking materials have dropped by 75%, deaths by 61% and fire-related injuries by 70% — in part because of a wholesale decrease in smoking and a greater awareness of smoke and fire detectors. Still, smoking materials are the number one cause of home fires, killing between 700 and 900 people a year.

The states’ actions could be a harbinger of bad news for the upholstered furniture industry. Once the coalition, an arm of the National Fire Protection Assn., succeeds in pushing safe-cigarette law through in all 50 states, will it then campaign for fire-safe upholstery?

That could be a nightmare for the upholstered furniture industry, which has done an about-face since the early days of UFAC and now wants a federal standard, fearing that separate laws in all 50 states would be a nightmare.

While upholstery and fire safety has been a decades-old problem, it has always been on the back burner. But it could be that time is finally running out.