Slate's Jack Shafer is the best press critic in this country by a mile. He's the only journalist I've seen who raised questions over last week's report that tobacco companies have been spiking cigarettes with ever more nicotine. That news just doesn't make sense; in order to increase profits, cigarette makers would want to lower the nicotine content — smokers would then have to buy more cigarettes to get their fix. Shafer:
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. ... Could it be that 1) the methodology behind the Massachusetts results isn't consistent; or 2) the mix of cigarette brands tested changes sufficiently from year to year to alter average nicotine yields?
Yes. Read it all.
[via Boing Boing]
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