Every major industrial or office building in New York City and Nassau and Suffolk Counties has a group of furtive and guilty-looking men and women loitering and milling about the front of the edifice.

In their yellow-stained fingers are cigarettes. When they press that lit paper and tobacco object into their lips and inhale, a relaxation comes over them. These people are stating the fact that they cannot continue doing whatever they do for a living unless a cigarette break intervenes.

Cigarette smoking is legal, but these smokers are a harassed group. One of them confided to me, "They treat ax murderers better than smokers."

Non-smokers act superior to smokers and have no conscience about scolding and denigrating them. Placing their two hands about their throats and sticking their tongue out as far as possible is the way they protest having a smoker in their midst. Even in an outdoor setting non-smokers start sniffing and seeking the offender, as if they were Sam Spade on the trail of a mass murderer. Nice, calm, reasonable people get crazy in the presence of smoke and smokers.

I have come up with a modest, reasonable proposal to solve the fears of the non-smokers, and to seek some justice for the tobacco addicts. No nicotine patches or other indignities.

My plan calls for picking up these smokers outside buildings and sending them to fresh-air camps in Upstate New York near the Canadian border.

Sunlight, fresh air, sufficient oxygen, good sleeping habits and no tobacco products would be the regimen. Healthy foods would be served and the taste of foods will be returned to the palates of these former cigarette smokers.

Softball games, canoeing and lanyard-making would also be on the schedule. After the trumpet plays Taps each evening, games of Scrabble and Monopoly would be in order.

In a couple of weeks these rosy, red-cheeked former addicts would be dropped off in front of the buildings from where they were first seen.

They will be pure in mind and body, and no longer nicotine-stained.

They will return, wholesome and healthy-lunged individuals.

I think this plan can work. Don't you?