Tobacco.org

• Fighting for Safety 

Since its inception, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has grappled with how to reduce the number of deaths and injuries from accidental fires. . . .

For years, there has been an obvious way to address accidental fires: requiring tobacco companies to make cigarettes, which are the leading cause of fatal fires, self-extinguishing. But tobacco was exempted from CPSC jurisdiction when the agency was created in 1972, and a 1994 attempt to give the agency authority over cigarettes failed.

Catching Fire

The alternative was to focus on the furniture that was catching fire. And the tobacco industry, which wanted to avoid further regulation of cigarettes, did its best to steer the CPSC in that direction.

The industry's agent was a former insider named Peter Sparber. Sparber, now in his early 60s, started out as a newspaper reporter in New Jersey and became a vice president of the Tobacco Institute, the industry's lobbying arm, in the 1980s. There, he built a national network of tobacco-friendly fire marshals to call on in the fight against fire-safe cigarettes. To win their loyalty, the industry gave out hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to fire departments across the country, according to internal documents released under the 1998 multi-state tobacco settlement.

By the late 1980s, Sparber had set up his own firm and was a volunteer lobbyist for the National Association of State Fire Marshals. In 1994, the group petitioned the CPSC to require furniture manufacturers make upholstered furniture so it would resist ignition by a smoldering cigarette and small open flames.

Unknown to the CPSC at the time, Sparber was still on the tobacco industry payroll . . .

In 2000, New York passed the first fire-safe cigarette law, which took effect in 2004. Twenty-one states have followed suit, including Maryland, effective in July.

Sparber, however, had an incentive to stick around. Starting in 1999, lobbying registration records show, he went to work for the top producers of brominated fire-retardant chemicals, which include Chemtura of Middlebury, Conn., and Albemarle of Richmond. The industry stands to benefit if the CPSC adopts the fire marshals' original proposal.

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