Big Tobacco’s Dollars Douse Push for Fire-Safe Cigarettes

Many people know that smoking is considered the nation’s leading preventable cause of death. But it is less widely known that cigarettes also are the leading cause of fatal fires, responsible for about a quarter of all U.S. fire deaths. Often, the 1,000 victims each year are not just smokers who drifted off to sleep, but children and other innocent bystanders.

Yet many scientists and fire officials say these deaths could often be avoided because small design changes in cigarettes would make them less prone to start fires.

And indeed, during the last quarter-century, many bills have been introduced in state legislatures and Congress to require cigarettes to meet a fire-resistance standard.

But tobacco companies, claiming fire-safe cigarettes would not be commercially feasible, have repeatedly overpowered or outflanked such efforts. And the way they have done it, secret documents and interviews show, is a textbook example of a powerful industry using its wealth and ingenuity to stave off regulation.

They have done it through a sophisticated, two-pronged strategy that has included bankrolling in-house scientists and outside consultants to debunk the technical feasibility of safer cigarettes.

At the same time, they have attracted the strangest of bedfellows by doling out millions of dollars worth of grants, contracts and services to cement an ingenious alliance with fire-safety organizations. In the process they have won the favor, and in some cases the silence, of credible groups whose whole purpose is saving lives.

And they have shifted the fire-resistance burden to manufacturers of everything from mattresses and furniture to pajamas.

“Their answer [is] to fire-proof the world against our torches,” said Rep. John Joseph Moakley (D-Mass.), who began pushing fire-safe-cigarette legislation in 1979 after a family of seven perished in a cigarette-caused fire in his district.

But some fire groups, grateful for tobacco’s financial support, appear to have accepted the industry’s argument that fire-safe cigarettes remain a pipe dream.

“I can’t overemphasize the good that this money has done,” said Fred Allinson, president of the National Volunteer Fire Council, which has received heavy support not only from cigarette manufacturers but from smokeless tobacco giant United States Tobacco.

Firms Deny Any Cynical Motives

Tobacco officials deny any cynical motives. “Philip Morris has a long history of giving back to the communities in which our employees live and work, and that includes supporting the fire-fighting community,” a company spokesman said.

Others see it differently.

“It would be like the international chiefs of police getting funding from the Mafia to fight crime,” complained Andrew McGuire of the Trauma Foundation, a safety group in San Francisco that has campaigned on the issue since the 1970s.

But the strategy has paid huge dividends for the tobacco industry by dividing the people whom lawmakers consult on fire-related issues--as occurred last spring in New York when a fire-safe-cigarette bill was defeated.

The companies also have gained from the issue’s low profile, and lack of priority status with anti-smoking groups.

Meanwhile, in a span of a few days last month, an invalid woman in Venice died in a house fire ignited by a cigarette; in Biddeford, Maine, a 51-year-old disabled man died when a cigarette fire engulfed his apartment; and cigarette fires killed people in Texas, Florida, Missouri, Virginia and South Carolina. It was just an ordinary week.

In many ways, the tobacco industry today has never seemed more vulnerable--as evidenced by its dismal image and fervent campaign for congressional protection from mega-lawsuits. But while the industry is seemingly on the ropes, its mastery of the fire-safety debate reflects its staying power.

“This is not the industry of old,” said Don Shopland, a veteran official with the National Cancer Institute. “But they’re far from dead and far from dying . . . in terms of having a lot of clout to . . . influence the political process.”

Idea Has Been Around for Decades

Although cigarettes seem like nothing more than tobacco wrapped in paper, they are in fact carefully engineered to look, taste, smell and burn a certain way--and to go on burning when not being puffed.

This spares smokers the trouble of lighting up again, and pays off in higher sales from cigarettes burning out in ashtrays. But it also means that a cigarette rolling off the lip of an ashtray onto a mattress, or into the crack of a sofa, can smolder undetected for 30 or 40 minutes before bursting into flames.

The idea of safer cigarettes has been around for decades, with dozens of patents granted on ways to make cigarettes burn cooler or go out when not being puffed. Cigarette makers say these ideas either won’t work or would produce cigarettes no one would buy.

The result is that with active encouragement from the industry, government and business have pursued a policy tobacco foes describe as “making the world safe for cigarettes.”

Under voluntary standards and government mandates, for example, furniture and mattresses have been made more fire-safe, cutting down on cigarette fires. However, this approach has limitations, because the long life-cycle of such items assures that flammable furnishings remain in use.

Big Tobacco’s fear of changing its products is easy to understand. In the U.S., cigarettes are a nearly $50-billion-a-year business, and among the most profitable of all consumer products. With so much at stake, the cigarette makers are adamant about doing nothing that might reduce the appeal.

They also worry that if government gets involved in the chemistry of the manufactured cigarette, there is no telling where it might lead. Better to focus on individual carelessness than endanger the golden goose.

Lawsuits are another concern. A dead or disfigured child could be a hugely sympathetic plaintiff if it were shown that his or her injury could have been prevented.

With that in mind, an attorney with a top tobacco law firm voiced dismay in 1987 when R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., in introducing its novel Premier brand, boasted that Premier--which heated, rather than burned, tobacco to reduce secondhand smoke--was coincidentally less apt to start fires.

Reynolds’ announcement “seriously undercuts” the industry’s legal position, warned William S. Ohlemeyer of Shook, Hardy & Bacon, in a memo leaked to The Times.

“In litigation that is now quite unattractive . . . the existence of a ‘goof-proof’ cigarette . . . could make this litigation significantly more attractive” to plaintiffs, he wrote.

The threat fizzled when Premier bombed in test markets and was not mass-produced. Still, pressure was growing in Congress and the states. It intensified after 1987 when a federal task force concluded that a few small changes in cigarettes--including making them thinner, packing the tobacco less densely, and using less porous paper--would reduce the risk of fires.

Tobacco companies said such cigarettes would burn differently and produce more toxic smoke. However, the federal task force found that the more fire-safe experimental cigarettes produced “tar, nicotine, and carbon monoxide . . . within the range of yields from the best-selling commercial cigarettes.”

As a tobacco official had warned earlier, simply claiming that fire-safe cigarettes were impossible had become “politically inadequate.”

“The technology does exist as reflected in certain European cigarettes, as well as” two American brands, wrote Michael Kerrigan of the Tobacco Institute in a 1982 memo leaked to The Times.

About the same time, officials with Burson-Marsteller, public relations consultants to the industry, outlined a bold and imaginative plan of outreach to the fire service. The time had come to “position the tobacco industry as a concerned ‘part of the solution’ to influentials,” the memo said.

According to these and other documents obtained by The Times, which has previously reported some of them, the cigarette makers:

* Set an ambitious goal of establishing 200 separate “working relationships within the fire community,” according to a Tobacco Institute memo. By 1986, the memo reported, the cigarette makers were “68% toward our goal.”

* Exploited its friendships to dissuade fire groups from backing fire-safe-cigarette legislation. For example, when a fire-safe-cigarette bill was pending in Massachusetts in 1988, industry representatives got a fire chiefs’ group to oppose the bill, and also “drafted appropriate testimony for the fire chiefs,” according to a memo.

* Sought to weaken the role of fire leaders who were “potentially more zealous” about cigarette fires. “Each of these people could be preempted by others from their organizations (which should be encouraged),” said a 1988 memo.

The engine was oiled by money, and lots of it--distributed in the form of grants, equipment, and PR and lobbying services to national fire organizations and fire departments throughout the land.

Soon tobacco firms were funding “the largest privately financed fire education/fire prevention program in the United States,” John Rupp, an industry lawyer, told a Minnesota legislative panel.

Tobacco money bought audio-visual equipment and educational materials for scores of big city departments to run safety workshops for residents. The Milwaukee Fire Department got smoke detectors to distribute to the poor. The San Francisco Fire Department got a Chinese-language television spot promoting use of smoke alarms. Fire officials and experts were paid to develop curriculum materials, and national fire groups were given slick membership brochures and fund-raising kits.

Ties to Safety Groups Concern Some

While advancing the cause of safety, these programs invariably stressed fire causes and solutions other than cigarettes.

Tobacco companies “have been helpful, . . . as well they should,” said Thomas Brace, president of the National Assn. of State Fire Marshals. “They make a product that clearly has a . . . fire problem associated with it.”

Others are uneasy about the ties. “These guys are trying to buy us--the people who save lives from tobacco fires,” said Donald J. Boyle of the Firemen’s Assn. of the State of New York, which has refused tobacco money.

The original matchmaker was Peter G. Sparber, a Tobacco Institute vice president during the 1980s. Sparber later established his own Washington lobbying firm, sharing offices with lobbyist Paul C. Bergson, previously an R.J. Reynolds vice president.

Sparber, who did not return phone calls, still lobbies for R.J. Reynolds and has remained close to fire groups. He has served as legislative representative for the National Volunteer Fire Council, which for awhile ran its Washington office out of his.

Sparber also serves, pro bono, as legislative representative for the National Assn. of State Fire Marshals. The group gets financial support from Philip Morris Inc. and R.J. Reynolds--and is backing their stand in the most recent phase of the fire-safe-cigarette fight.

Now and in the past, such ties have proved invaluable to the industry.

In 1990, for example, the National Volunteer Fire Council helped the industry water down regulatory legislation in a debate that largely escaped public attention.

Moakley had offered his latest bill to set a deadline for safe cigarettes. The industry floated a rival proposal, called the “Fire Safe Cigarette Implementation Act,” co-sponsored by Rep. Thomas J. Bliley (R-Va.). By name, a dead ringer for a bill with teeth, it merely provided for another multiyear study.

Many fire groups lined up behind the Moakley bill, but Sparber and the National Volunteer Fire Council rallied others to endorse the call for further study.

Some who endorsed the industry proposal later said they hadn’t known it was one of two bills before Congress, and the weaker of the two. But lawmakers, facing a split, took the middle ground. They declined to mandate safer cigarettes, instead funding development of a test method by which to establish the safety of specific brands.

The research was done by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, part of the Commerce Department, and published in 1995. It outlined two methods to test fire resistance of cigarettes by putting them on stacks of filter paper or a type of cotton fabric.

Last spring in New York, state lawmakers considered a bill to require cigarettes to pass the NIST test.

A coalition of fire and consumer groups endorsed the bill. But in the heat of the debate, the New York State Professional Fire Fighters Assn. announced its opposition, calling for more education to make people “aware and responsible for their actions.”

According to two witnesses, its opposition statement was distributed at a legislative hearing by Brian Meara, a lobbyist for Philip Morris. “I can’t comment,” Meara told The Times.

The New York Assembly passed the bill, but the state Senate defeated it.

The issue currently is dormant in Congress, and ignored in the proposed nationwide tobacco settlement. But it is before two more obscure forums.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is considering a petition to require more fire-resistant furniture--a proposal that could reduce fire losses and simultaneously relieve pressure to change cigarettes. The petition was filed by the association of state fire marshals.

Meanwhile, the influential American Society of Testing and Materials is considering giving its imprimatur to the NIST test--in effect, endorsing a vehicle for regulating cigarettes.

The society, which draws technical experts from industry, academia and government, has adopted standards for everything from playground equipment to structural steel. Although advisory, these standards often become law when adopted by reference in statutes and codes.

Tobacco firms are waging a fierce campaign in the ASTM to discredit the NIST test. They claim it is a poor predictor of how cigarettes will perform because the fabric used in the test is not like many fabrics on the market. Thus, the industry says, brands might do well on the NIST test yet still cause fires.

In December, at an ASTM meeting in San Diego, Richard Gann of the NIST defended the accuracy of the test.

But he was outnumbered by tobacco representatives. Scientists from Philip Morris, Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. and Lorillard Inc. made lengthy presentations attacking the NIST test.

A representative of the state fire marshals association supported them.

Meanwhile, other fire leaders, including some from the same group, seem genuinely perplexed by the decades-long stalemate.

“Clearly, we are in support of a fire-safe cigarette,” said Brace of the fire marshals association.

“I don’t know why it has taken so long to reach some kind of an accord.”