Cap Lounge Fire Prompts Call for 'Fire-Safe' Cigarettes

As we mentioned briefly yesterday, the second fire in two years at Capitol Lounge has been found to have resulted from the same reason as the first: a cigarette, which was left burning in a trash can behind the building. Last week's fire caused about $100,000 of damage to the Lounge as well as the Trover Gift Shop next door. Now The Examiner reports that D.C. Fire Chief Dennis Rubin is calling for a new law which would require vendors in D.C. to offer "fire-safe" cigarettes in the hopes that their availability might prevent similar fires in the future.

Fire officials are in discussions with the mayor’s office to introduce a mandate that would require vendors to offer smokers the option of buying fire-safe cigarettes, D.C. fire spokesman Alan Etter said. Such cigarettes are wrapped with thin bands of less porous paper that choke off the flow of oxygen and create “speed bumps” that slow down a burning cigarette.

When left unattended, the tobacco hits the speed bump and extinguishes.

More than half of all states have already moved to require the sales of these kinds of cigarettes, including New York, Minnesota and Delaware, and the National Fire Protection Association has been lobbying other states to pass such regulations for some time. The tobacco industry argued for many years that smokers would not find fire-safe cigarettes acceptable, but studies have shown most consumers found no significant difference between them and regular cigarettes. In reality, tobacco companies didn't want to make them for more obvious reasons: they're slightly more expensive to produce, and they feared offering them would lead to a tacit admission that cigarettes are a fire hazard -- a legal situation they'd rather not put themselves in. But now that over 30 states have adopted laws making fire safe cigarettes mandatory, the industry has been forced to make them available in order to comply with the new regulations. Evidence from New York suggests that cigarette-related fires have gone down since the law went into effect in 2004.

If anything, Rubin's call to require vendors to offer smokers the option of buying fire-safe cigarettes would seem not to go far enough to achieve his goal. A law requiring that all cigarettes sold in the District be "fire-safe" would make more sense -- though of course, there's not much D.C. could do about cigarettes purchased in Virginia or Maryland being smoked within D.C. borders. For those of you who smoke, would you prefer having the option of buying fire-safe cigarettes, or would you rather all cigarettes just came that way so you don't have to think about it?

Photo by yonas1