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This article focuses on the long-standing, but recently intensified controversy over cigarette smoking. It traces the history of the controversy through a variety of laws and regulations. In the late 1960s and the 1970s a variety of laws and regulations were implemented to regulate smoking and the smoker. Many view this controversy using a medical model or emphasizing the conflicting rights of smokers and nonsmokers. The article analyzes the controversy as a status battle between pro and smoking vested interests. Cigarette smoking, as a social phenomenon, provides an opportunity to examine the creation of deviant categories. Like alcohol and other drugs which are common to everyday life, cigarette smoking has a long history of changing normative definitions. Cigarette smoking was reemerging as a deviant behavior, and argued that this reemergence was a status battle between non-medical interests. Furthermore, recent and significant changes in smoking attitudes and behaviors seemed to reflect those social conflicts.