ORANGE COUNTY VOICES TOBACCO : Smokers Circle Wagons in a Cruel World : Despite growing pressure on users, the weed remains legal and listed as a “food crop” that is subsidized by the government.

Did you know you can strike up a warm conversation with an attractive female outside any of our county buildings on the basis that you both still smoke?

The society of smokers, not yet capitalized, has become an exclusive club. Its members are sympathetic to each other’s needs. They recognize each other at the flick of a Bic and are victimized everywhere by No Smoking signs that were once restricted to sawdust mills and gunpowder factories.

Workers who smoke and are conscientious resort to imaginative measures. A senior Superior Court clerk in Santa Ana that I know rarely goes inside the courthouse where she can’t smoke; she works all day on the fire escape where she can.

An accountant I also know works on spreadsheets in her car, rather than mingle with office colleagues on the brink of imaginary suffocation.

Other workers, less conscientious, abandon their desks and step outside whenever their nicotine level gets dangerously low. It is done to the extent that you can spot a smoker because he or she looks tanned and well rested from doing three hours of work a day.

I was jabbed aware of the no-smoking tyranny on a trip to San Francisco where I was forbidden to smoke in a cigar store.

Later, when I was told to put out a cigarette in a Santa Monica building I happened to own part of.

Still later when I was told the same by a hitchhiker I picked up at the corner of Brookhurst and Warner.

Since then the allergy to tobacco has spread from hypochondriac to hypochondriac like an infectious virus, gaining stridence as it goes along. It has crowded us smokers into a silent minority that never, by any sort of vote, has been established as a minority.

Source of this illusory nonsense, I guess, was a memo that a former health officer named C. Everett Koop had carelessly left unshredded. (Showing how far you can trust a doctor who calls himself “general” and dresses like an admiral.)

The linkage of smoking and cancer had been known for so long that Sinclair Lewis mentioned it in “Main Street.” But what was news to the surgeon general was amplified shrilly by medical authorities that included lovelorn columnists and force-fed into the public neurosis.

Tobacco clinics sprang up everywhere and became richer than thieves overnight.

Smokers didn’t need to be told they were engaging in a self-destructive (but comforting) little habit. What really set sister against brother was the remarkable finding that people who light up are in less danger than people around them.

The “second-hand smoke” theory made so little sense that it was adopted immediately as part of conventional wisdom. What had been a minor sin became aggravated assault. Our windowless modern buildings, which do not expel used air so much as recirculate it, suddenly became gas chambers.

Fear-crazed office managers plastered up No Smoking signs in panicky haste. Smoking occupants were banished to parking lots and fire escapes and enjoyed equal status with sex offenders and serial murderers.

Yet tobacco, the disgraceful weed that kills at a distance, remains legal. Not only legal but listed as a “food crop” and subsidized by the government.

Which reminds me, I have a daughter who lives in tobacco country (though she neither grows it nor smokes it). I have to fly transcontinentally to see her, and I can only go 12 minutes without smoking before I start to unravel.

Domestic pilots can smoke because they have to have their brains about them but passengers can’t. Yet with the help of five airlines and two charter services, I’ve devised a short-hop route where I can catch a smoke at airports between planes. This way I don’t arrive at my daughter’s new Kentucky home in a body bag.

If you have pencils ready, the itinerary is Orange County-to-Palm Springs-to-Vegas-to-Elko -to-Salt Lake-to-Denver-to-Salina-to-Kansas City-to-St. Louis-to-Cincinnati-to Lexington. This may take longer than the nonstop, no-smoking route but it won’t seem longer.

Passengers on international flights can still poison each other indiscriminately. This offers a glamorous alternative for next year’s fatherly journey. Air France Flight No. 004 nonstop from LAX to Paris, and on quick turnaround catch Delta Flight No. 21 non-stop from Paris to Atlanta. Atlanta-to-Nashville-to-Lexington and I’m there!