I've already deleted four one-line answers in this thread. This is a reminder for all prospective commenters that you are in /r/AskHistorians and we have strictly enforced rules.

Hi! Lawyer here.

The reason tobacco never really got attacked the way that alcohol, opium, marijuana, and cocaine did has to do with moral panic more than anything else, though I can't stress enough that there really was an addiction problem to be dealt with for the four drugs I listed. I'll break it down by drug, because the histories are different for each one. Long story short, tobacco was universal during the era and not associated with any particular social ills, and the discovery that smoking is bad for you had to wait until the 1960s to really become public knowledge. In contrast, opium, cocaine and marijuana were all associated with racist moral panics, and alcohol addiction in the United States was an enormous, unavoidable social problem, comparable to the obesity epidemic today.

Opium and cocaine: Opium and cocaine used to be basically free for purchase in the United States. This eventually led to major social issues, especially given that it was common practice at the time for dangerous patent medicines to be made up of hard liquor laced with opium or cocaine. There was a clear public health and consumer protection problem to be addressed, which is why initially federal drug control acts focused on limiting usage, through the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Harrison Act. (Also, racism played a huge role. Cocaine-crazed Negroes rampaging through the streets, or opium-addicted Chinamen were seen as threats to American society.)

Thus, the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, for instance, required any "dangerous" or "addictive" substances to be listed on a pharmaceutical's label, including opium, alcohol, and cocaine. The Harrison Act of 1913 effectively banned cocaine and opium for nonmedical uses by imposing prohibitive taxes.

Marijuana: Marijuana was introduced by West Indians and Mexicans to America, and led to a series of moral panics that led to the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which regulated cannabis in much the same way that opium and cocaine were regulated at the time. (If you want a good look at what the moral panic looked like, the 1936 movie "Reefer Madness" cleanly encapsulates the fears of the era.)

Alcohol: The sale, transport and manufacture of alcohol was banned by the 18th Amendment in 1919; this was later reversed in 1933 by the 21st Amendment. As I've posted before:

Drunkenness was a major social crisis, as alcohol was cheap, plentiful, and one of the few amusements available to the poor. In the period 1865-1919, mass immigration and the breakdown of the former social controls that had kept drunkenness in check during the preindustrial era led to a mass public health crisis due to ubiquitous, largely unregulated alcohol. It didn't help that these problems were heavily apparent among urban immigrants, like Jews, Germans and Irish, which played directly into the nativist fears of rural Anglo-Saxon Protestants. (It's not an accident that the South was heavily in favor of Prohibition.) The war on alcohol was a decades-long project, just like the war on obesity is today. And just like obesity, the same kinds of players emerge, with, say, PepsiCo and McDonald's playing the same type of role as Anheuser Busch and Pabst did a century ago.

Sources: Daniel Okrent, Last Call; Thomas Quinn & Gerald McLaughlin, The Evolution of Federal Drug Control Legislation, 22 Cath. U. L. Rev. 586 (1973).

Alcohol was made illegal with the Eighteenth Amendment in 1918, and was later reintorduced to the US with the Twenty First Amendment. There are also some municipal prohibition laws that are still in effect today. To expound on OP's question did tobacco ever "leave and come back" on a major scale like alcohol?

I'm a Europeanist/Empire specialist, so this is going to be a "big picture" response:

short answer: timing.

Beer, wine, vodka, etc. all stretch way (way) back into European pre-history. As drugs, they were all long-integrated into European culture, and so "regulated" by cultural means. (i.e. folk tales warning about the bad peasant Drunken Hans who drank too much beer and ignored his wive and kids and they all starved to death, "so sad--so children, don't be like bad Drunken Hans!"--that's what I mean by "cultural" regulation.) Alcohol was part of everyday life.

Then, in the first wave of European expansion, all these lovely new "drugs" came into European culture. Coffee (caffeine), tea (caffeine), tobacco (stimulant), cocoa (stimulant), refined sugar (ahh, sugar). They were all pretty addictive, and helped to drive the first wave of colonial expansion. Importantly, they were all expensive, so started out being consumed only by the very rich.

Some were integrated pretty easily into European culture, though it took time. (Sidney Mintz's "Sweetness and Power" is a classic overview of how sugar became integrated into everyday life in English society over centuries... mostly by being connected to tea, that other great stimulant).

Marcy Norton (Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures) argues that tobacco and cocoa, tightly integrated into the Native American cultures of the new world, actually followed those same lines (i.e. her title, tobacco as a sacred gift, cocoa as a profane pleasure) as they were integrated into European elite culture. I don't buy it for a second, but it's a really interesting argument.

Tobacco certainly got a lot of "push-back" at first... lots of priests railing about how sinful it was. (The Devils' Weed!) But over time, it became part of upper-class culture (pipes and later, cigars.)

The second wave of addictive drugs came later:
Opium started to follow the same path of tobacco (upper-class integration--think of Coleridge Taylor or Conan-Doyle with their dabbling in opium-smoking), ...but then got major pushback in the 19th century, partly because it was affordable to a larger group of people, and partly because of the new mass-media, which thrived on scandal and sensationalism. (stories about opium dens and Chinese criminality circulated in the new tabloids, etc.). Other new drugs--like Heroin or (new to Americans) marijuana, followed the same path... adoption by elites, then, as they spread to the people, push-back fueled by media-stoked sensationalism. (Isaac Campos has a great new book on the role of marijuana in the history of Mexico...)

The cigarette hit during this anti-drug mass-media sensationalism, but it was just a new, cheaper, quicker-to-smoke version of tobacco... tobacco for the masses... so it was seen as sort of "democratizing" the already-integrated elite consumption of tobacco. Same with the cocoa-sugar combo (think Cadbury and Hershey), just democratizing elite consumption. So it escaped the sensationalist news-stories about opium-driven orgies or marijuana-fueled murders.

With the United States, the odd-man out in this pattern is not other drugs... it's alcohol. The American temperance movement (resulting in the 18th Amendment) is really, really weird. It's a rejection of a long-integrated drug. Why? I dunno. (not an Americanist) I'm guessing anti-alcohol movement fed off of latent Puritanism mixed with lots of anti-immigrant feeling (fear of the "drunken Irish", etc.) but I'm not sure.

TL/DR: timing: the "first" drugs hit Western culture when they were expensive, and could be enjoyed only by elites, who were presumed to know how to handle them; they expanded gradually to the masses (cigarettes, chocolate).
The second wave (opium, marijuana, heroin) hit when the "people" could obtain them off the bad--and everyone knows the great unwashed are like children, and can't be expected to act with restraint...so there needed to be legal regulation. And this need was stirred up by the new mass-media, which needed sensationalized drug-scares to sell papers. That's the big picture.