Urges Philip Morris and other large companies to stop testing cigarettes and cigarette smoke on innocent animals.
Every tobacco company tests their products on animals with the exception of American Spirit brand.
At this very moment, pregnant monkeys at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center are being kept in small, barren metal cages, their fetuses exposed to nicotine. Funded by the U.S. government, ORPRC experimenter Eliot Spindel acknowledges that, "the deleterious effects of maternal smoking during pregnancy are all too well established." Yet his five-year study, during which he will kill the baby monkeys and dissect their lungs, is funded with tax money through 2004.
This is one of countless examples of cruel and completely unnecessary experiments. Experiments funded by large grants from Philip Morris, to inject animals with nicotine, force them to inhale smoke and addict them to tobacco--a substance that they would never normally encounter or imbibe if left in peace.
Experiment after experiment attempts to prove or, even more disconcertingly, disprove in rats, mice, hamsters, lambs, dogs, cats, monkeys, and other animals, what is already known by the medical community to be true for humans; smoking causes cancer of the lungs, larynx, tongue, salivary glands, mouth, pharynx, and esophagus, 50 - 55% of all strokes in the United States are directly attributable to cigarettes smoking, and smoking during pregnancy hurts babies.
Yet the experiments go on. Millions of tax dollars, hundreds of thousands of animal lives, let's put a stop to this now!
