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In the 1950s, the causal link between smoking and lung cancer surfaced in medical journals and mainstream media. Yet the best years for the Canadian cigarette industry were still to come, as per capita cigarette consumption rose steadily in the 1960s and 1970s. In Cigarette Nation, Daniel Robinson examines the vibrant and contentious history of smoking to discover why Canadians continued to light up despite the publicized health risks.
Highlighting the prolific marketing and advertising practices that helped make smoking a staple of everyday life, Robinson explores socio-cultural aspects of cigarette use from the 1930s to the 1950s and recounts the views and actions of tobacco executives, government officials, and Canadian smokers as they responded to mounting evidence that cigarette use was harmful. The persistence of smoking owes to such factors as product development, marketing and retailing innovation, public relations, sponsored science, and government inaction. Domestic and international tobacco firms worked to furnish Canadian smokers with hope and doubt: hope in the form of reassuring marketing, as seen with light and mild cigarette brands, and doubt by means of disinformation campaigns attacking medical research and press accounts that aligned cigarettes with serious disease.
Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, including thousands of industry records released during a landmark tobacco class-action trial in 2015, Cigarette Nation documents in rich detail the history of one of Canada’s foremost public health issues.
"Robinson’s Cigarette Nation is an excellent example of seeing the unspoken but ever-present aspects of material culture." Canadian Business History Association Reviews
"Readers of Cigarette Nation will come to understand the factors that created a cloud of public ambivalence around cigarette smoking — a behaviour that was for a time almost universally taken for granted as commonplace." Canada’s History
"A compelling book that should be widely read by medical historians, historians of consumer culture, and historians of addiction." Catherine Carstairs, author of The Smile Gap
"In part, Cigarette Nation was made possible by 'a massive haul of Canadian tobacco industry documents' that were made public during a 2015 class action case in Quebec. Cigarette Nation is excellent. Like the vodka martini, the rolled joint, the heroin needle, and the coffee cup, the cigarette opens a world of social, cultural, political, and even military history." The Canadian Historical Review
"Cigarette Nation is a groundbreaking exploration of the intricate tapestry of cigarette production, marketing, and use. For Robinson, where there is smoke, there is fire, and his intriguing analysis situates the tobacco habits of average Canadians in the context of monopolistic corporate power and their sophisticated marketing schemes. He exposes the yellow, nicotine-saturated story of Canadian public health advocates’ legal, political, and economic struggle to curb one of the greatest non-contagious plagues of the twentieth century. Robinson’s book is a must-read that opens a range of historiographical reflections for further research on regional cigarette smoking variations. We should expect to see this not as the last word on Canada’s cigarette history but as inspiration for a new stream of Canadian tobacco history." Histoire sociale / Social History
"Cigarette Nation is a good read, mustering an impressive range of sources and paying close attention to the discussion of smoking in popular culture. It helps illustrate the development of a sophisticated collaboration among tobacco manufacturers to counter, initially with tremendous success, an existential threat to their industry. For those of us who were raised in a pallor of blue smoke, this book will answer questions we may not have known we had." American Review of Canadian Studies