The Fire Safe Cigarette ABA Fact Sheet on Fire-Safe Cigarettes Annually, between 900 and 1,000 people in the United States die from fires started by cigarettes and an additional 2,500 to 3,000 are injured. More than 100 victims who die every year are children and nonsmokers. In 1997, there were more than 130,000 cigarette related fires.
Cigarettes are the leading cause of fatal home fires in the United States.
At present, no regulation requires cigarettes to meet fire safety standards. H.R. 1130, the Fire-Safe Cigarette Act of 1999, if passed, will mandate that all cigarettes imported or manufactured in the United States must be fire safe. A fire-safe cigarette has significantly less propensity to ignite furniture or mattresses when carelessly discarded. Small design changes including use of less dense tobacco, less porous paper, a smaller diameter, filter tip, and no added citrates to the paper are key components of a fire safe cigarette. Although the technology to produce fire-safe cigarettes has been available for more than a decade, the tobacco industry refuses to manufacture and distribute them.