The stupid drug story of the week.

Journalists give tobacco companies the same benefit of the doubt they do alleged baby-rapists, which is to say none. And who can blame them? For a century, the tobacco industry has lied and obfuscated about their products at every turn.

Yet serial liars aren't automatically guilty of every charge leveled against them. Even the tobacco company baddies, who took a wicked beating this week in the press, deserve a fair hearing before we hang them.

The news hook this week was a Commonwealth of Massachusetts report about nicotine yields in cigarettes increasing by 10 percent since 1998. The Boston Globe's headline reports "Cigarettes pack more nicotine," and the story's lede alleges that the boost makes "it tougher for smokers to quit." The story quotes Massachusetts officials, anti-smoking advocates from public health and law, but no critics of the report. The tobacco companies declined, across the board, to talk to the press.

The Washington Post story, titled "Nicotine up Sharply in Many Cigarettes," states that "the higher levels theoretically could make new smokers more easily addicted and make it harder for established smokers to quit." Only slightly more skeptical than the Globe, the closest the story comes to finding a critic of the report is a University of California at San Francisco physician who says, "I don't think we know what the consequences are for the population in terms of addictive behavior and how hard it is for people to quit."

The New York Times  headlines its story from the Associated Press "Nicotine Levels Rose 10 Percent in Last Six Years, Report Says." The lede sources to the report the observation that the increase makes "it harder to quit and easier to be addicted." No critics are quoted. CBS News and ABC News broadcasts take the same tack as the newspapers, quoting public-health officials and other anti-tobacconists complaining about the dangers of increased nicotine. The New York Times editorial, "Raising Nicotine, on the Sly," deduces from the report that tobacco companies are "sneakily making cigarettes more addictive."

That every form of tobacco—cigarettes, cigars, pipes, chew, snuff, "light" cigarettes—is injurious to health is a given. If you want to live a long, healthful life, you should avoid tobacco; if you currently partake of the weed, you should quit. But the shoddy 15-page Massachusetts report (PDF) and the lazy news stories it generated forgo science for alarmist public-health propaganda. Hate the tobacco industry as much as you want, but not over this.

Cigarette testing has long been controversial. In the late 1960s, the Federal Trade Commission ordered tobacco companies to report tar and nicotine yields in cigarettes. It hoped that armed with data, smokers would steer away from high-tar cigarettes on the assumption that they were more dangerous than low-tar smokes. The FTC reported (PDF) results from the tests from 1968 through 1998.

If you click here, you'll see that tar and nicotine yields dropped steadily from 1968 to 1998. (The FTC weighted its final tar and nicotine results by sales of specific brands to better reflect the actual overall consumption in the market by smokers.)

The FTC still collects cigarette emissions data but stopped reporting it to the public in the late 1990s because of a variety of real criticisms. For one, researchers contended that FTC-approved smoking machines did not accurately mimic the way humans smoke cigarettes, making the "nicotine yields" invalid. For another, the tobacco industry was cravenly exploiting the FTC reports, as internal documents from tobacco giant BAT cited in a recent Lancetarticle show. The Lancet authors found that BAT deliberately developed "cigarettes that produced low yields under standard testing protocols, whereas in consumers' hands they elicited more intensive smoking and provided higher concentrations of tar and nicotine to smokers." BAT also ignored ethical questions raised by its senior scientists, the article reports.

The Lancet authors continue: