Tell the FDA: no tobacco testing on animals, sample message

PETA

Click HERE to submit your comment; please use United States for country, and I wrote “self” for organization and used “Drug Association” for category, the only two required fields besides your comments.

BACKGROUND

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Tobacco Products has issued draft recommendations for the testing of some tobacco products. This guidance would allow companies to conduct cruel animal tests to demonstrate the “reduced risks” of new products and ingredients. These deadly tests are included in the guidance even though they are irrelevant to human smokers and there are more modern and accurate non-animal methods available, such as computer simulation, tests using human cells, and clinical studies with human smokers.

In some of the horrendous tobacco tests that could be conducted, rats would be forced to breathe tobacco smoke for as long as six hours a day for months at a time by jamming the animals into tiny canisters and pumping concentrated cigarette smoke directly into their noses. The animals would then be killed and their bodies dissected.

For decades, the tobacco industry used results from these misleading animal tests to deny the link between smoking and cancer because animals forced to inhale cigarette smoke don’t develop the same diseases that human smokers do.

Belgium, Germany, the U.K., and other countries have banned the testing of tobacco products on animals, and all the tobacco safety tests required by the Canadian government are modern, non-animal methods.

We need to tell the FDA loudly and clearly that no more animals should suffer and die for these archaic, inaccurate, and cruel tests on products that we already know are deadly when used as directed!


WHOM TO CONTACT

Please exercise your right as a U.S. citizen to submit a polite comment to the FDA urging it to remove any language recommending or allowing animal tests from its draft guidance on tobacco product testing.

Note: Comments must be submitted before June 4, 2012. Click HERE to submit your comment now; please use United States for country, and I wrote “self” for organization and used “Drug Association” for category, the only two required fields besides your comments.


SAMPLE COMMENT

I am shocked to learn that the FDA continues to support animal experimentation on tobacco products. Considered archaic and fundamentally flawed, product testing on animals lacks social legitimacy and validation.

Furthermore, to foster an idea that consumers continually support animal experimentation due to some inaccurate notion that it will prevent them from being harmed is unprincipled. Animals suffer drastically different effects from tobacco use than humans.  Tobacco use and abuse can factually lead to harm regardless of how many animals are wrongfully killed during the product testing phase.

Please make both the ethical and financially-responsible decision to discontinue animal experimentation immediately: remove any language recommending or allowing animal tests from its draft guidance on tobacco product testing;  join an increasing body of countries who are listening to a concerned and attentive consumer population who refuse to be complicit in the inherently malicious and ineffective industry of animal experimentation.

people want to smoke,
they have a choice
animals do not,
so we are their voice!!!

Karen Lyons Kalmenson