Tobacco Facts.

New fire-safe cigarettes may have some smokers wondering why their cigarette keeps going out and the taste isn’t quite the same.

The new fire-safe cigarettes that go out when they’re not puffed have been slowly integrated during the past month because of recent laws that went into effect on New Year’s Day.

Georgia is among 12 states among the last to require that all cigarettes meet standards first implemented by New York six years ago. The new states with laws going on the books Jan, 1 were Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

“Finding the ‘old’ packs now might be impossible,” said Yunus Kalavant, manager of the Citgo on North Broad Street in Rome that has already fully integrated to the new packs.

He explained that the transition happened over a couple of months, and that now, he can only order the new fire-safe cigarettes.

“People try to come in and pay a dollar more for ‘old’ packs,” Kalavant said. “Sales have dropped. Customers have been saying the cigarettes taste really weird.”

The fire-safe standards require cigarettes to burn out 75 percent of the time when not in active use. They also don’t create as much smoke when not being puffed.

“There’s tiny, ultra-thin bands of paper that are literally layered on the white part of the cigarette and when the lit end of the product crosses one of those bands it acts like a speed bump and it slows down the burn rate,” said David Sutton, spokesman for Altria Group Inc., parent of Philip Morris USA, the nation’s largest tobacco company.

Sutton denied that fire-safe cigarettes contain any new materials or present an additional danger to smokers.

“It’s the same tobacco blend,” he said. “It’s the same kind of paper — it just has rings on it. It’s the same filter. There’s no additional adhesives or any other materials added to the product.”

According to a clerk at the BP on Shorter Avenue, the store worked the new cigarettes in slowly and although they haven’t seen sales go down, a lot of people have complained about “the cigarettes going out too soon” and have said, “they don’t like the taste.”

Most tobacco companies have supported the move to fire-safe cigarettes.

Sutton said his company has been working with states to make sure all adopt the New York standards. The maker of Marlboro, Chesterfield, L&M and Virginia Slims plans to sell nothing but fire-safe cigarettes by Feb. 2 regardless of state laws.

Most states allow businesses to sell conventional cigarettes past the effective dates of their laws until existing stocks are exhausted. Fire-safe packs are generally marked with “FSC,” for Fire Standards Compliant.

By Nick Godfrey

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