Smoking is recognized as a chronic disease caused by dependence on the nicotine present in tobacco products. According to ICD-11, it is part of the group of "mental, behavioral or neurodevelopmental disorders" due to the use of psychoactive substances. This brings it closer to biomedical and legal notions related to substances classified as “drugs”. The anti-smoking sensitivity in vogue in Brazil, as well as in many other countries, results from the confluence of at least two narratives: the constitution of smoking as a public health problem and the emergence of a transnational political scenario around the issue. The actions foreseen by the Brazilian National Tobacco Control Program include the articulation of a treatment network within the Unified Health System, which includes programs, campaigns and other educational actions. Among the activities carried out are support groups aimed at people who want to give up the smoking habit. I have carried out fieldwork in these groups, in basic health units in the city of Goiânia, capital of the state of Goiás, located in the Center-West of the country. Fieldwork has revealed that social markers of difference, such as class, race, gender and age, generate normative expectations and delimit places from which participants in these groups can create tobacco cessation itineraries. These are important analytical keys to ethnograph meanings that they mobilize in relation to cigarettes and their therapeutic itineraries to abandon it. And they are also important elements to reflect on possible gaps between their expectations and those of health professionals who coordinate these meetings. I intend to bring these elements from the fieldwork to reflect on how the transformation of smoking into a public health problem relates to and updates some important contemporary notions for biomedicine, such as the ideas of prevention, risk and risk practices.