It is clear to everyone that the pharmaceutical industry uses animal experiments when researching new active ingredients. But cigarettes and animal testing?

In the Philip Morris laboratory in the Belgian city of Leuven alone, up to 6,000 animals die in the laboratories every year, allegedly for scientific experiments.

According to the responsible authorities, the cigarette manufacturer wants to “test the harmful effects of smoking new types of cigarettes. However, this is in contradiction to research that is intended to benefit human well-being.”

On the Philip Morris website , the justification is the rather absurd claim that animal testing also serves to “avoid animal testing in the future”. How the cigarette manufacturer intends to reduce the number of animal tests by increasing the number of animal tests remains a mystery, as do the many years (or perhaps decades?) that will pass until then.

“The animal tests were used to make the company’s products less harmful. There is no scientific alternative to these tests.” Yet even the layman now realizes that it could be much simpler. Around 40 years ago, a cigarette was essentially just tobacco. In the meantime, however, it has become common practice to add a veritable cocktail of chemicals to tobacco. The harmfulness of smoking could be reduced simply by eliminating all these additives. Not a single animal would have to sacrifice its life for this realization – which is, however, deliberately ignored by the tobacco industry.

In any case, the validity of such studies is more than doubtful, as even the tobacco industry itself has demonstrated. For decades, she denied the causal link between smoking and lung cancer, which has since been scientifically proven and recognized in humans as well. The reason given was that this connection could not be established in mice.

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