Tobacco Settlement To Be Wasted by OHSU
 Oregon Legislators Decide No Means Yes

 
In November 2000, Ballot Measure 89, which would have given OHSU up to $10 million dollars of the tobacco settlement money (from the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA)), was defeated.  So, legislators took the liberty to fork over 20 times that amount.

Despite the will of Oregonians, Oregon Senate Bill 832, which became law on August 8th, 2001, will hand over approximately $200 million dollars from the tobacco settlement to OHSU to use for research. It is a supreme irony that compensation for the lives of people killed by tobacco is going to animal research.
Why is it that several decades ago, doctors were advertising cigarettes? It is because of animal research. No matter how hard they tried, vivisectors could not induce lung cancer from cigarette smoke in animals. Because animal models did not link smoking to cancer, the tobacco industry denied that smoking caused cancer. In the 50's and 60's they paid physicians to advertise cigarettes. Because of convention, ignorance and greed, this animal-based conclusion, that smoking is not harmful, was passed on to the public. And, countless people died.

"The link between smoking and lung cancer in humans was denied for many years based on vivisection data. Health warnings were delayed for all those years." 
Moneim A. Fadali, M.D., Animal Experimentation, A Harvest of Shame, p.44

"Animal experiments failed notoriously to demonstrate a smoking-cancer connection for over half a century…If the greatest killer of our time was promoted by physicians based on animal experiments, there is obviously something terminally wrong with the system." 
Dr. Ray Greek, Sacred Cows and Golden Geese, p.144-145

Using the tobacco settlement for animal research is much worse than throwing it away. The only research that has helped victims of smoking related illness is human based study. The relationship between tobacco and cancer was discovered through epidemiological studies (comparative studies of human populations).

…all the useful evidence we have accumulated about cancer has come from human studies. The links between chemicals, x-rays, foods, and asbestos on the one hand and different types of cancer on the other hand were all obtained after doctors had studied human patients. Instead of helping, animal experiments have consistently slowed down the speed with which these essential discoveries have been accepted. 

For example, the link between tobacco smoke and cancer was spotted decades ago by doctors working with human patients, but animal experiments were used as an excuse by politicians who wanted to avoid taking action against (and therefore annoying) the wealthy tobacco companies. Researchers spent decades making beagles smoke cigarettes and painting tobacco tar of the backs of mice in attempts to establish a laboratory link between tobacco and cancer-a link which was not needed since links clearly existed between tobacco and human cancer. The decades of vague and inconclusive results gave the tobacco companies a chance to keep the confusion going and to prevent doctors giving their patients authoritative warnings about smoking tobacco. Doctors knew that cigarettes caused cancer but were encouraged to keep quiet while animal researchers spent years failing (quite predictably) to obtain any conclusive results." Dr Vernon Coleman, Why Animal Experiments Must Stop, p.73-74


“To my knowledge, It’s not been proven that cigarette smoking causes cancer…I base that on the fact traditionally, there is, you know, in scientific terms, there are hurdles related to causation, and at this time there is no evidence that they have been able to reproduce cancer in animals from cigarette smoking.” - quoted in the New York Times, December 1993. Greek and Greek, Specious Science p. 83, quoting William Campbell, president and CEO of Phillip Morris, testifying in 1993

OHSU has chosen to ignore the well-documented futility of animal research in studying the effects of smoking. Since 1978, Eliot Spindel of the Oregon Primate Center has been conducting nicotine studies on rhesus monkeys. Originally he was injecting pregnant monkeys with nicotine, and studying the effects on lung development in the fetuses. Over time he has made small changes to the study in order to keep the funding going. In 2000 he began allowing the fetuses to go full term and then killing the babies at different developmental stages to study their lung development. This study was given rubber stamp approval by the primate center's Animal Care and Use Committee, not because it has contributed anything to human health but because it looked in line with what Spindell had previously been doing.

In 1972 human epidemiological studies confirmed that  smoking causes fetal abnormalities