When Durham resident Adam Lang first smoked a fire-safe cigarette, he hated it.
"It's a pain in the butt to relight," he said. "I couldn't stand it. I won't buy them."
But Lang may have no choice. In hopes they will prevent cigarette-related fires, legislators passed a new law that will require all cigarettes sold in North Carolina to be self-extinguishing beginning in January 2010.
"At every certain interval [the cigarettes] have bands of paper that are not as porous," said Ernest Grant, chair of the North Carolina Fire-Safe Cigarette Coalition. "When the lighted cigarette reaches a band, it goes out."
Similar legislation is already in place in 22 other states and all of Canada. Grant said if enough states adopt laws mandating the sale of self-extinguishing cigarettes, impending national law will force major cigarette companies to start manufacturing them.
"This is the way to give them the big nudge," he said. "R.J. Reynolds [Tobacco Company] and Lorillard [Tobacco Company], particularly Lorillard, have always stated that they want national legislation... [but] they know that nothing's going to happen at the national level, and that's why we're adopting it at the state level."
Potentially, the new law will significantly lower the number of those killed or injured in North Carolina by cigarette fires, Grant said. Since January, approximately 300 people have been killed or injured by cigarette fires in the state, he added.
"The folks around here might remember the Pine Knoll incident," he said. The blaze, caused by discarded smoking materials, destroyed 38 Raleigh townhouses and cost an estimated $12 million in damages.
On campus, cigarette fires occur most often in trash receptacles and mulch areas, said Fred Knipper, fire and safety manager in the Occupational and Environmental Safety Office.
Duke Student Government President Paul Slattery, a senior, attested to the difficulty of putting out a cigarette fire.
"Somebody in my house-and all five of us smoke-threw a cigarette into the mulch in the front yard," Slattery said. "For about three or four hours, people kept saying 'Man, that smells awesome.'"
Slattery and his friends dug a large hole to put out the fire.
"If I smoked a fire-safe cigarette and it sucked it'd be a little disappointing," he said. "But I plan on being dead by then anyway."
Cigarette companies in North Carolina-the No. 1 tobacco-manufacturing state in the country-are concerned about the financial implications of mandating the sale of fire-safe cigarettes.
Greensboro-based Nat Sherman Cigarettes anticipated the change and made the switch last year.
"All of our product is now fire-safe," said Chris Ege, director of customer relations at Nat Sherman. "[However], they do cost more [to manufacture]."
He declined to say how much making fire-safe cigarettes cost Nat Sherman.
Critics of the fire-safe cigarettes have said they are less convenient because they constantly have to be relit and because some brands do not manufacture fire-safe cigarettes.
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