The Senate is expected to consider this month a bill that would give the Food and Drug Administration regulatory authority over tobacco products. Regardless of objections by tobacco state senators, the Senate should not hesitate to pass the bill. It’s already been passed by the House. And a vigorous ruling by a federal appeals court two weeks ago, and the latest report by a noted lung cancer research doctor, make the case for regulation indisputably clear.

The sweeping court ruling, issued by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, unanimously confirmed a powerful lower court ruling that spelled out in an exhaustive 1,653-page opinion a raft of unarguable facts about the tobacco industry’s racketeering conspiracy of deceit and lies over decades to persuade smokers that cigarettes are not nearly as harmful or carcinogenic as the companies knew, and as health experts independently have found.

The study by Dr. David Burns, a national tobacco research authority and prominent writer on tobacco issues, finds that the way tobacco leaf is cured in America over the past 40 years has vastly accelerated the creation of nitrosamines, a cancer-causing agent. That has made cigarettes significantly more likely to cause the specific type of lung cancer (adenocarcinoma) associated with smoking.

In earlier decades, Dr. Burns noted, tobacco was mainly air-dried in tobacco barns. But in recent decades, tobacco farming has been speeded up by the use of nitrogen fertilizers for growing it, and propane heaters for drying it. That combination has lead to a much higher level of nitrosamines in tobacco and commensurately higher rates of lethal lung cancer relative to the rates found in countries, like Australia, that still air-dry their tobacco. The rate of lung cancer in American smokers, Dr. Burns reports, is virtually double what it was in 1964, when cigarettes were first identified as a health hazard by the Surgeon General, despite the use of cigarettes with lower tar and nicotine.

His findings bolster the court ruling that makes it compellingly clear that the nation’s big tobacco companies have acted deliberately and in concert to misrepresent and underplay just how addictive, toxic and lethal smoking cigarettes and using other forms of tobacco are to users.

Tobacco’s lethality should be obvious, of course. Approximately 400,000 Americans die every year from smoking related illness. Even so, the rate of tobacco use in recent years has remained fairly steady, and in some cases has increased, in many states, especially among the less educated in the South. That alone is testament to the power of the tobacco industry’s fraudulent marketing strategies and lies.

The court of appeals upheld virtually all of the lower court’s ruling, and most of its punitive measures. The lower court ruling, a landmark opinion issued by Judge Gladys Kessler, found that big tobacco companies operating in America participated in a massive civil racketeering scheme that effectively defrauded the public about the health hazards of smoking.

Judge Kessler ruled that the companies “marketed and sold their lethal product with zeal, with deception, with a single-minded focus on their financial success and without regard for the human tragedy or social costs that success exacted.” She ordered the companies to stop their marketing deceptions, including packaging and marketing of “low-tar,” “light,” and similar terms used to falsely convey the notion of less hazardous tobacco products and less hazard of second-hand smoke. Finding that tobacco companies knew for years that users smoke more of such cigarettes to meet their need for nicotine, she also ordered corrective advertisements to educate consumers about their peril, and also the peril of second-hand smoke.

The appeals court reaffirmed all that evidence. Its ruling effectively confirmed, as well, that the tobacco industry’s guile, falsehoods and maliciously deceptive marketing are so egregious as to merit strict regulatory oversight. Of course, tobacco companies object, and the industry’s powerful and rich lobby is hard at work now in attempts to derail the move for regulation of tobacco.

Given its record of deceit and fraud, however, tobacco companies deserve no relief. Through their deceit, fraud and legacy of dead tobacco users, they’ve earned strict regulation.