Concerns have been raised over moves from Scotland to push the UK Govt into adopting fire safe cigarettes because they have not been tested to measure the impact on public health.
Indian public health and social activist supremo Hemant Goswami and British Pro-choice group Freedom2Choose say the Reduced Ignition Propensity Cigarettes (RIPs), although welcomed to reduce fire risks, could be dangerous to people’s health and they should not be introduced until the effects of using them are known.
F2C says the RIPs have been given backing by anti-smoking MSP Stewart Maxwell who wants Scotland to become the first country in Europe to introduce the cigarettes which go out quickly if unattended.
Maxwell, who has support from fire chiefs, is calling for a change in law at Westminster to make the cigarettes compulsory.
Concerns were raised over the issue of RIPs by Goswami at a conference in Arkansas two years ago.
Goswami has asked the scientific community to be more alert before embracing the concept and says there has been a clear strategic push by the tobacco industry to influence US states to adopt it.
“We must do independent primary research before accepting and adopting concepts like fire-safe cigarettes which are claimed to be less likely to catch indoor structural fires if left unattended. Such concepts have been only tested from the fire-safety point of view and no independent study has still been undertaken by the scientific or public health community to assess the effect of the engineered modifications in RIP cigarettes.,” he said.
F2C chairman Andy Davis questioned the rush move to introduce RIPs and said it appeared that ministers like Maxwell had no regard for the health of citizens.
“Certain materials which would not smoulder or burn were discarded and ignored in the study and lit cigarettes were placed between layers of material to maximise damage. This would never happen in normal life,” he said.
“If these modified cigarette papers are an effective way of fire-prevention, they are potentially dangerous to consumers and should not even have been considered until rigorous scientific tests have proved their safety.”
Eight fire deaths were said to have been caused by smouldering cigarettes last year