Walgreens, the largest drugstore chain in the country, calls itself %u201Cthe pharmacy that America trusts.%u201D Yet it continues to heavily support health charities that fund scientifically and ethically questionable animal experiments%u2014while giving little to no support to health charities that only provide vital patient services or only advance research without the use of animals. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is leading the Council on Humane Giving%u2019s efforts to promote compassionate medicine that does not involve animal testing. Check out their website:
http://www.humaneseal.org/
Animals in laboratories are often forced to endure early separation from their mothers, social isolation, prolonged captivity, sensory deprivation, repeated physical harm, and euthanasia when they are no longer considered useful to research.
In an experiment conducted by the Walgreens-funded American Heart Association, researchers caused strokes in primates by removing the animals%u2019 left eyes and placing a clamp on a critical blood vessel through the empty eye sockets. Even though this type of animal use has been done for more than 50 years, more than 150 effective stroke treatments in animals have failed to produce effective human treatments!
Yet Walgreens executives disregard this information, refusing to take the first step toward creating a more progressive and thoughtful corporate giving policy. Please tell Walgreens to stop donating to health charities that fund outdated and cruel animal experiments.
Animal studies can neither confirm nor refute hypotheses about human physiology or pathology. There are countless superior and ethical alternatives to the use of animals in research.
Hundreds of charities preserve human health and do not engage in cruel or scientifically questionable research and, according to opinion polls conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation of Princeton, N.J., are preferred by a majority of Americans. I call on Walgreens to support public health and public opinion by changing its corporate giving policy to one that supports only those health charities that abstain from funding animal research.
We the undersigned request that Walgreens support only charities that do not test on animals.
