Tobacco companies and anti-smoking groups are waiting nervously for the outcome of a landmark case brought by Invercargill woman Janice Pou.
The five week case has wound up with both sides clashing over whether it was common knowledge here in the 1960s that smoking was a serious health risk.
Cancer victim Pou vowed that smoking sent her to the grave and on Monday lawyers closed her case calling for two tobacco giants to be made accountable.
"They cannot logically allege a 17-year-old shop assistant in Invercargill must have known in 1968 along with the rest of the country that smoking was dangerous," says David Collins QC, lawyer for the Pou family.
Pou died a self-confessed smoking addict, seduced she said by glamorous ads. She tried and failed to give up smoking countless times over 30 years.
Now Judge Graham Lang must weigh up whether tobacco giants British American Tobacco and WD and HO Wills had a duty to warn New Zealanders before 1974 when the first health notices popped up on cigarette packets.
"Common knowledge or obviousness are one and the same, you either know something by knowledge or you know something by seeing it...it's as simple as that...there is no duty to warn," defence lawyer Michael Camp says.
But Collins says that health warnings competed with a very sophisticated advertising campaign and denials from the industry that there was a causal link between smoking and lung cancer.
The defence says Pou could have reduced her exposure to cancer had she stopped smoking by 1985, but her family says she simply couldn't kick the habit.
Lang has reserved his decision.
Pou's children will have to wait up to six weeks to learn whether they will get the $300,000 in damages they are claiming for the loss of their mother.
