We're all entitled to go to hell in our own way, so long as we don't drag anyone else along with us against his or her will. So if you want to smoke, go right ahead -- just as long as I don't have to inhale with you.

But, if you're a smoker, let's not pretend that you're anything other than seriously addicted to a toxic substance. And let's not pretend that your addiction is purely voluntary, a matter of individual choice and free will. It may have begun, as did mine, in the womb, through your mother's bloodstream, if she smoked (if we acknowledge the existence of "crack babies," let's recognize the logical parallel of "nicotine babies" too). Or it may have started later. But your encounter with nicotine, and your indoctrination into the culture of nicotine addiction, began the moment you flew the gestational coop; you were birthed into a world of cigarette smoke, cigarette smokers, and cigarette merchandising. However long thereafter you picked up your first coffin nail, you'd not only been exposed to endless cubic yards of second-hand smoke, but to years of omnipresent, incessant pro-smoking propaganda. Don't think for a minute that the decision to light up was entirely your own.

I smoked my own first cigarette in 1957, at the age of 14, convinced that it would make others think of me as more mature and manly than I looked. (Where on earth could that idea have come from? Surely not from Marlboro ads . . . ) Within a year I was smoking a pack a day. In 1972, when I was 28, having by then smoked a pack a day for half my life -- over 5000 packs, which probably cost around $4000 back then, no small sum during that period -- I managed to quit for good. It took me some eight attempts to break the addiction, surely the most virulent and pernicious of my entire life experience. I did it cold turkey, experienced a very difficult withdrawal that lasted several months, and didn't really get it out of my system for a year.

So I have a great deal of sympathy for those addicted to this substance, and recognize all of their excuses, rationales, discourtesies and other failings, having manifested them all myself at one time. I have absolutely no sympathy for the lying, greedy bastards at the helm of the tobacco industry, or the corrupt politicians (read: Sen. Jesse Helms and his cronies) who are their government stooges; and my empathy for the people lower down on the chain of command, including the tobacco-factory workers and the tobacco-field hands, is roughly on a par with my commiseration with the plight of people forced to grow opium for a living. They're participants in the merchandising of disease and death, however you slice it.

I'll never know how much long-term, irreversible damage I did to my health by smoking, of course. Are some of those consequences my own damn fault? Sure -- even though I was a naive, impressionable kid when I started. Might some of the blame be properly placed on the shoulders of the nicotine-addiction industry? I happen to think so -- and those two positions are not contradictory.

I'm sitting here looking at a souvenir program for a 1950 National League baseball game between the Phillies and the Yankees. Casey Stengel was managing the Yanks, Billy Martin was on second, DiMaggio was in the outfield and Yogi squatted behind the plate. I was already a (Brooklyn) Dodgers fan at that time, so these guys were the arch-enemies, but still they were demi-gods; their word was good with me.The program is filled with cigarette ads. Phil Rizzuto (a cigarette hanging from his lips) and Robin Roberts instruct me to "Make YOUR next pack Chesterfields." Would a little kid have felt some impulse to emulate them and follow their advice?

But the ad that really grabs my attention now is the one for Old Gold cigarettes. Illustrated with someone's version of an Indian "medicine man" (this was before the days of "Native American"), it presents a text that astonishes in its disingenuousness, duplicity, and outright fraudulence. Listen to this:

"No medical war whoops from Old Gold . . . We're Tobacco Men not Medicine Men! Not for all the wampum in North America would we join the chorus of 'medical' claims for cigarettes. For nearly 200 years our sole profession has been curing just one thing -- the world's best tobacco. We believe that for top smoking enjoyment, your most convincing medicine is -- just light up and enjoy an Old Gold. No friendlier flavor . . . no mellower mildness . . . no more deep-down smoking pleasure -- that's your Old Gold! For a Treat instead of a Treatment treat yourself to Old Golds!"

"'Medical' claims for cigarettes"? Such claims were the work of quack doctors in the hire of the tobacco industry. What a clever trick : Pay a bunch of venal M.D.s to concoct "scientific evidence" that smoking actually benefits your health, then modestly reject those claims -- while at the same time implanting them ever more firmly in the public's unconscious.

These people -- the heads of the tobacco industry, their medical hirelings, their PR staffs, their research divisions -- are a crowd of conspiratorial, lying, cynical drug dealers who have knowingly been poisoning millions of people for profit for decades: serial killers who should be arrested on criminal charges and put on trial for mass murder. The tobacco industry stockholders who've profited from this trade in sickness and death should be pilloried publicly, and have their profits seized. And all those who work in this industry should be ashamed of themselves; all are implicated in this massive crime.

The extent of the duplicity of the tobacco industry's top management -- lying to the public, perjury before the U.S. Congress, cover-up and destruction of vital evidence, obstruction of justice -- has begun to become internationally known at last. The documents that have come to light over the past 2-1/2 years provide incontrovertible evidence, going back decades, proving that they knew all along that they were peddling narcotic addiction.

Keep an eye on the massive settlements that have started to roll in -- settlements that have the industry heaving sighs of relief, because they could have been much greater. Then ask yourself if the nation's "war on drugs" shouldn't have been directed at this enemy within from the very beginning, and whether it wouldn't make sense to direct it at them starting now.