NIH-Funded Nicotine Testing on Animals

by Stephanie Ernst

category: Animal Testing and Vivisection

Published October 23, 2008 @ 06:02AM PT

Perhaps you've noticed in the last few days that one of the actions currently featured in the sidebar is "Tell the NIH to Stop Testing Nicotine on Animals." For those of you who haven't read the summary there yet, I'll repeat my brief introduction to the action, sponsored by In Defense of Animals (IDA):

Researchers in the United States, with the help of millions of taxpayer dollars and the support of the federal government and National Institutes of Health (NIH), are still conducting cruel nicotine experiments on helpless animals—pregnant and newborn monkeys as well as rats and mice—even though the harmful effects of smoking are already well-known.

The first time I learned that the tobacco industry and federal government both are still funding nicotine and smoking experiments on animals (this campaign relates to just one area of such testing; there are more), I was stunned.

Many proponents of animal testing and medical research are fond of arguing that such testing and experiments are performed only when necessary—only when tests on animals are the supposedly best, most reliable option we have, only when the experiments' results could lead to significant human benefits, and only when the potential benefit to humans outweighs the harm to the nonhuman animals used in the tests.

What-the-hell-ever. IDA points out, "Animal experiments failed to demonstrate that exposure to cigarettes and tobacco smoke caused lung and other forms of cancer, which is now undisputed in humans." Yet conducting intensely cruel experiments on mother and newborn monkeys is our best, most reliable method of addressing the issue of smoking during pregnancy? How does the extreme harm to these monkeys not outweigh the potential benefit to humans when we already know that pregnant mothers should not smoke and when the ability of such experiments to predict results in humans has been disproven rather than proven?

For more details on what's happening to these monkeys and on what you can do to help, I direct you to the following pages, videos, and Web sites:

• The Change.org action page for this campaign
• IDA: Animals Lives Up in Smoke
• IDA: Help End Nicotine Experiments on Monkeys at OHSU (with details on the particularly heinous experiments being conducted by an OHSU researcher)

And finally, a (non-graphic) video on the OHSU research: