Today Could Be a Drag for Unrepentant Puffers : Health: The annual Great American Smokeout is to be observed today for the 14th time. Its aim is to help smokers take that first step toward quitting.

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

Citizens 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.

A Laguna Beach attorney, who feels so socially incorrect as a smoker that he asked not to be identified, said he is careful around whom he lights up, but not just for health reasons.

“If im going into a business conference, I never smoke. It decreases your credibility to smoke, if you’re in a deposition or legal conference,” he said. “It’s terrible. I’m going to have to quit.”

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

Katie Row, spokesperson 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.”

In Orange County, there are about 500,000 smokers, according to a spokeswoman for the American Cancer Society’s county office. Officials there hope 50,000 of them quit today for the smoke-out.

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.

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 past 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 affects of second-hand smoke.

The irony of the smoking debate is that many, if not the majority of smokers, agree the addiction is unhealthy for everybody.

Still, George Follman, vice president of a hang glider and wind surfing company in Newport Beach and a smoker for 20 years, believes 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 “Hope”-brand 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.