The smell wafted from my lanai, a noxious cloud of stink. It crept over the railing and into my apartment, where it settled like ocean sand after a big wave, covering everything. My nose seized up, urging me to retch.

My downstairs neighbor was smoking again.

Looking over the railing, there he was, wrists folded over, the red embers glowing, a tendril of white rising toward me.

I went back in and slammed the sliding glass door, hoping it would be strong enough to vibrate off a chunk of his ash and put the darn thing out. Or at least guilt him into smoking somewhere else. No such luck.

Smokers are maybe the most vilified people in society, next to felons, and I'm loathe to pile on. But I can't help it.

With nothin' but love for the sinners and hating the sin, still, I gotta say: You people are gross!

Steve Martin said it best in his classic bit about smoking (you can YouTube it for the audio clip). He's eating in a restaurant and some guy asks, "Hey, mind if I smoke?" And Steve replies, "Why, no! Do you mind if I FART? It's one of my habits."

Admittedly, hating smokers is self-righteous. It's like railing against the Nazis or sneering at easy-listening music. It's simple and justified.

But I felt even more smug when I read about all the 'opala that was collected from beaches worldwide last September, organized by the Ocean Conservancy. Of 6 million pounds of harvested junk — on beaches from the U.S. to Bahrain to Bangladesh — a third of it was cigarettes and filters.

So maybe not all smokers are tossing butts out their car windows or down the gutters — just most of them. Like that guy driving the shiny-new Benz down Nu'uanu one day when I was running, who pitched his butt into the middle of the street. All that money, zero class.

And then the report out last week that life expectancies for many women around the U.S. are dropping for the first time since 1918 — a trend spurred by long-term consequences of smoking, which women picked up in large numbers years after men did.

So maybe women, on average, will live shorter lives, thanks to cigarettes. Which is sad, but fine. I don't have a problem with thinning of the herd. If your attitude is "Hey, we all gotta die of something!" then don't let the ER door hit you on your noggin on your way to having your lung removed.

But it means crummier healthcare for the rest of us because of costs associated with managing those diseases. It means dirtier beaches and oceans. It means I can't sit in my living room and breathe in the trade winds without the odor of Marlboro.

Maybe I'm self-righteous. But that's just selfish.

Reach Christine Strobel at cstrobel@honoluluadvertiser.com.