Sparking fire safety

Jackson Holland was smoking a cigarette around 4 p.m. one weekend day outside his Mount Ivy, N.Y., home when he dozed off, police said.

While asleep, the 74-year-old man dropped his cigarette, which ignited the padding in his chair and his clothes. Holland died from his wounds, having suffered third-degree burns over 90 percent of his body.

Cigarette-ignited fires are the leading cause of home fire deaths in the United States, killing 700 to 900 people annually, according to National Fire Protection Association.

Additionally, thousands of victims suffer devastating burn and lung injuries, and property losses total hundreds of millions of dollars each year. One in four cigarette victims is not the smoker, and many of the victims are children. It doesn’t get a lot of attention but there is a quiet fire safety campaign sweeping the country.

The Coalition for Fire-Safe Cigarettes, a national group of fire service members, consumer and disability rights advocates, medical and public health practitioners, insurers and others, coordinated by the NFPA has been advocating that all cigarettes sold in the United States be self-extinguishing.

These cigarettes must meet a specific fire safety standard and are less likely than traditional cigarettes to cause a fire if left unattended. The most common technology used to make fire-safe cigarettes is with special banded paper that slows down and extinguishes a cigarette’s burn if the smoker is not actually puffing on it.

Advocates tried to get tobacco manufacturers to produce the fire-safe cigarettes on their own. When that effort went nowhere, they tried to get Congress to act but that was slow. So, they turned to states.

States are listening.

Six states — New York, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont — have such laws already on the books, covering more than 25 percent of the American people. Canada requires such cigarettes nationwide as well.

This year, a surprising 15 states have followed their lead and adopted fire-safe cigarette statutes.

“Hundreds of lives are lost each year to fires caused by smoking materials. Yet the technology for fire-safe cigarettes exists and is working,” said James M. Shannon, president and chief executive officer of NFPA.

The coalition exists and is working as well.

To find out more, visit www.firesafecigarettes.org.