Down and Dirty

here's three reasons why

Breath

Addiction

tobacco and Animal Testing

Every cigarette funds cruel animal testing. For the past fifty or more years, the tobacco industry has been conducting secret animal testing.

Some people out there might think that animal testing is acceptable if it’s for drugs or something that is going to save human lives. Fine, that’s a reasonable attitude. But that’s not what we are talking about here.

The tobacco industry conducted animal testing to find animals that did not get sick from smoking in order to be able to lie to the public about the health effects. And when they found animals that DID get cancer or emphysema, they destroyed the research, fired the scientists and most likely killed the animals too.

R.J. Reynolds, Camel cigarettes, does research with dogs, monkeys, mice and rabbits to understand the effects of smoking. But then, the research showed that smoking causes cancer and emphysema. A responsible company would do a recall, or at least do more research. The tobacco industry, though? No way. They destroyed the research, fired the scientists and tore down the freaking building! But this wasn’t the only time they did it. And the animals were tortured repeatedly simply to find ways to better lie to the public.

These descriptions are DIRECTLY from tobacco industry documents. Just a few hundreds describing how they tortured animals for no good reason.

“Monkeys- forced to smoke 12 cigarettes a day, in machines like this one. They were strapped down and forced to do something that is not at all natural or comfortable for six months, 5 days a week.”

“Beagles were also forced to smoke. They smoked so much that researchers saw smoke pouring out of the dogs’ mouths and noses. They were in obvious distress and 28 of them died from lung cancer. They gave dogs lung cancer, and then probably increased their marketing budget to sell more cigarettes.”

“Mice were forced to breathe either diesel engine exhaust or cigarette smoke for 6 hours per day, 7 days a week for 2 years! Nearly 1,000 of them died in the experiment.”

Any other product in any other industry that proves it makes people sick or kills them would be made illegal and banned. But the tobacco industry was barely even bothered for another 30 years. And internally, the industry didn’t even care. As long as they could replace new kids to replace the dying smokers, they were okay with it.

And don’t think this is all history. As recently as 2008, Phillip Morris, makers of Marlboro, was funding research that addicted and then killed monkeys… all to learn more about cigarette addiction.

Documents above were retrieved from the Legacy Tobacco Industry Documents Library at UCSF. Visit tobaccodocuments.org to search the massive archive of tobacco industry documents yourself.

*R. Binns And G. C. Clark. An Experimental Model For The Assessment Of The Effects Of Cigarette Smoke Inhalation On Pulmonary Physiology Ann Occup Hyg (1972) 15(2-4): 237- 49 Cdc.