Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: Cigarette Smoking as Deviant Behavior

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Abstract
This article focuses on the long-standing, but recently intensified controversy over cigarette smoking. In the late 1960s and the 1970s a variety of laws and regulations were implemented to regulate smoking and the smoker. Initially these strictures were what Gusfield terms assimilative, but more recently they have become coercive. In 1978, for example, a California referendum to ban smoking in most public places was narrowly defeated. Many view this controversy using a medical model or emphasizing the conflicting rights of smokers and nonsmokers. We analyze it as a status battle between pro and antismoking vested interests. Using data from a variety of primary and secondary sources such as government statistics, corporate reports, state codes, marketing reports and public opinion polls, we focus on the political, economic and organizational forces which have militated for or against changes. At stake is the symbolic definition of a behavior as socially approved or illegitimate and the consequent denigration of the losers. We predict more and increasingly militant confrontations between pro and antismoking forces, both at the individual and collective level.