BrandCanadian Legion
Brand Canadian Legion
Canadian Legion cigarettes were produced in Canada by the Macdonald Tobacco Company from about 1937 to roughly the mid-1960s. The Royal Canadian Legion is a service group (still in existence today) which offers help and advocacy for servicemen who fought for Canada during the major wars of the twentieth century. To this end, the Legion and Macdonald Tobacco struck a deal in which Macdonald's would make a cigarette bearing the Legion's name and crest, and the Legion would receive the proceeds from the sale of the brand. While this sounds absolutely surreal by today's standards, it should be remembered that most of the people in the armed forces smoked; indeed, they were sent free cigarettes en masse by governments and from citizens at home in care packages.
Made in the non-filtered style then popular, the contract was renewed in 1961, but the brand disappeared by the mid-1960s; this was no doubt due in part to the alarm which rose from the 1964 U. S. Surgeon General's Report, which definitively linked cigarette smoking with lung cancer.
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