It’s An Ill Wind Blowing for Smokers, Huddled in Corners : Health: The Great American Smokeout has helped to banish them from the mainstream, make them the pariahs of the ‘90s.

For former Monterey Park Mayor Pat Reichenberger, the craving hit about every two hours during long, tedious City Hall meetings.

Residents packed the council chambers, speakers roared at the podium, decisions had to be made. But every two hours, a single thought pounded her brain: “Cigarette.”

With no smoking allowed in council chambers, there was only one way out. Reichenberger would intone to the packed assembly hall: “At this time, a break has been requested.”

“It was my decision so I decided I could have a cigarette,” Reichenberger now ashamedly admits. “You have to lie a little bit.”

These are tough days for smokers--and today is one of the worst, when smokers feel even more besieged than usual. It’s the 14th annual Great American Smokeout, an event designed to bring the country closer to the U.S. surgeon general’s goal of a smokeless society by the year 2000.

“I’m trying to ignore it,” Reichenberger said.

By their own estimation, smokers have become the pariahs of the ‘90s. Scorned, hounded and reviled, they have been banished to dingy smoking rooms, reeking bathrooms and butt-littered street corners.

“You’re more socially acceptable if you’re a heroin addict,” complained Patty Prickett, an avowed environmentalist who eats only organic food, but still smokes a couple of packs a day.

Katie Row, spokeswoman for the American Cancer Society’s Central Los Angeles Chapter, agreed that for some nonsmokers, smoking has dropped below drug addiction on the vice scale.

“It’s not like drinkers drinking or drug users using drugs,” she said. “When people smoke, they injure the people around them.”

Although the numbers of smokers is dwindling (less than 30% of the adult population), for those who continue the habit, life has become an increasingly difficult job of finding new ways to keep puffing.

“You have to learn to be cunning,” Reichenberger said.

Mike Forren, a Lompoc resident with a two-pack-a-day habit, said the days of indignant smokers righteously battling any infringement of their right to puff in public are over.

He has adopted a strategy of adaptation to the new virulent climate. “Things are getting rough out there, even at home,” he said with a sense of resignation.

Forren said he asks now if he can smoke whenever he goes to someone else’s house. He usually sits in the nonsmoking sections of restaurants to accommodate his family. For the last few years he has accepted banishment to the patio whenever he wants a cigarette.

“Thank God I don’t live someplace like Montana,” he said, envisioning himself buried by a blizzard on his front porch.

The outcry against smoking has reached the point where some simply prefer hiding their habit.

Spouses smoke at work, but gargle before returning home. Dates avoid the subject. Dick Russell, a free-lance environmental writer, attended a conference on chemical sensitivity recently and put his cigarette in his jacket before entering the room.

“You get a little paranoid of people looking at you doing this awful thing,” he said.

Most smokers agree that the social stigma against smoking has reached fever pitch in just the last decade. Medical evidence has been mounting against them since 1964 when the U.S. surgeon general linked smoking with lung cancer, but the anti-smoking frenzy has escalated since 1986, when the surgeon general detailed the unhealthy effects of second-hand smoke.

The irony of the smoking debate is that many, if not the majority of smokers, agree that it is an unhealthful addiction for themselves and others.

“At some point you have to admit that all this evidence is undeniable,” said John Wasielewski, district representative for Assemblyman Mike Roos (D-Los Angeles) and an avid smoker. “We all keep waiting for the 100-year-old guy whose secret is smoking three packs a day and drinking, but it isn’t going to happen.”

Local ordinances against smoking in public places and reports of travelers being hauled off to jail for smoking on flights haven’t helped the smoker’s image much either.

“At least we’re not crack addicts,” said the health conscious smoker Prickett, who spent much of this year railing against the state for spraying malathion.

The problem, said Prickett, is that most nonsmokers see smoking not as a powerful physical addiction, but rather as a disgusting and obnoxious habit akin to spitting in public.

Prickett has tried to stop smoking at least six times. She tried quitting all at once, then gradually. She tried hiding cigarettes and putting scary anti-smoking articles on her walls.

She tried aversion therapy, in which you smoke until you’re sick. She enjoyed it.

“The hardest part is defending something you don’t feel great about,” she said. “I’m not proud of smoking. I’m a real addict.”

But with the rising tide of outrage against smoking, a backlash has begun to build from smokers.

Anthony Van Heusen of Bellflower has a T-shirt warning passersby that to “hassle” him for smoking “could be hazardous to your health.”

“I tell people to mind their own business,” he said as he savored a cigarette in front of the county Criminal Courts Building during a break from jury duty.

George Follman, vice president of a hang glider and wind surfing company in Newport Beach and a smoker for 20 years, agreed that the attacks against smoking have gone too far.

“It’s gotten real bad,” he said. “I can’t even feel comfortable smoking in a smoking area.”

He was infuriated by the smoking ban on flights in the continental United States. “If they ban smoking on international flights, I’ll quit flying.”

Follman, who used to smoke while hang gliding by putting his craft into a stall just long enough to light a cigarette, said he actually quit once 10 years ago, but was brought back into the fold by a near-death experience.

It happened in 1981 on the Japanese island of Kyushu where he was planning to demonstrate a new model ultralight airplane.

He launched off a peak in 30 m.p.h. winds and knew right away it was a bad idea. His craft was tossed out of control. He was blown over the jungle, over the ocean, past a web of high-power wires. The craft’s gas pedal broke off. Follman prepared for death.

He struggled to regain control of the plane and managed to crash-land in a rice paddy, leaving his plane a wreck. He was dazed, but unhurt.

When his rescuers arrived, the first thing he did was reach for a pack of Japanese cigarettes dangling out of a rescuer’s pocket. “I sucked that one down,” he said. He has been smoking ever since.

Any special plans for the Great American Smokeout?

“I intend to smoke my brains out,” he said.