It wasn’t so long ago that Big Tobacco was on nearly everyone’s mind nearly all the time — and not because their devious advertising tactics and poisonous products served the public good.

Now the world’s most successful tobacco company, Philip Morris International, is trying once again to break into the public consciousness with what it claims is a less toxic cigarette. An electronic device called IQOS that the company claims could save lives and deserves not only federal approval for sale in the United States, but the FDA’s endorsement as a “safer” alternative to regular cigarette.

The FDA is set to decide on both questions in coming months. They should tread very carefully and remember that they are dealing with an organization that can’t be taken at face value.

Part of the problem, health experts and antismoking advocates rightly note, is that the company hardly deserves to be trusted. Matthew L. Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, called the company “masterful liars” in an interview with The Washington Post.

Myers isn’t wrong. And the company’s response to such critiques amounts to a less-than-convincing “just trust us.”

“You don’t have to trust or believe us,” said Moira Gilchrist, one of the Philip Morris’ chief scientists. “You don’t have to take our word for it ... Look at the science we’ve done on this and base your decision on that.”

You don’t have to trust us, Gilchrist says, but we ask that you trust our science. That amounts to the same thing.

The follow-up question is simple: why should we? Only one independent group of researchers has evaluated IQOS. Their findings dispute several of the company’s claims about the product, and Philip Morris’ response to that study was so swift and ferocious that the researchers now refuse to discuss their work. Mitchell Katz, deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, which published the independent study, called the company’s response tantamount to intimidation.

Meanwhile, recall that this isn’t the first time the public has been told by tobacco companies that a healthier cigarette was on the way. It happened with the advent of filtered cigarettes in the 1950s, and again in the 1970s with so-called “light” and “low-tar” cigarettes.

It took health experts decades to disprove those claims, and even longer to take the companies to task legally for their wanton deception. In fact, just last year that Philip Morris was hit with a multi-million-dollar judgment in Massachusetts over its deceptive marketing of Marlboro Lights as less harmful than regular cigarettes.

That’s the lens through which people (and the FDA) should be evaluating the company’s science on IQOS.

This organization is one of the most practiced and successful liars in modern history. It spent $3 billion developing yet another “safer” cigarette, and now wants approval to sell the product in the United States (IQOS is already for sale in 25 other countries) and label it a safer alternative to smoking.

By all means, give Philip Morris permission to put IQOS on the American market.

But allowing the company to call this product a safer alternative to normal cigarettes? That would be repeating the mistakes of the past rather than learning from them.