We nonsmokers rock. We rule. We're the kings of the world, or at least this corner of it. And isn't it about time?

For too many years, we let the smokers get away with legalized manslaughter. Their secondhand fumes befouled our lungs, stunk up our restaurants, polluted our commercial airliners and made our workplaces and public arenas reek.

But we won. We've got those nicotine junkies and their dealers on the run. Some small skirmishes continue, but basically we kicked their rumps.

Now, in victory, aren't we overdoing the end-zone dance? The smoke-free workplace is a wonderful thing, but the move to ban smoking in every last public place -- even the stand-alone bar or tavern -- seems extreme and vindictive.

Like the fanatical Taliban mullahs who took over Afghanistan, we nonsmokers are ruthless with our newfound power. We're in charge now, and heaven help anyone we think is failing to embrace our fundamentalist doctrine on smoking.

In Kabul, the Taliban has been known to flog men and cut off the fingers of women caught smoking in public. In Corvallis and Eugene, the Kabuls of Oregon, the anti-smoking mullahs are thankfully barred from such means of punishment, but they have decreed fines of up to $500 for men or women caught smoking in public places.

In the new order, there's only one correct view -- our view. We got the smokers' exhaust out of our lungs and out of the public places we like to visit. And now we're cleaning up their lungs and the public places they like to visit.

Let's be clear about a few things, though: Smoking is a dirty, deadly habit. The world would be a better place without it. Prevention programs are noble, and the tobacco industry has earned our contempt.

But let's admit something else, hard as it may be: The use of tobacco is legal in this country, and it's going to stay that way. And although smokers have no right to befoul the air the rest of us breathe, they do have the right to smoke. For every poor nicotine addict trying to quit, there are others who enjoy using tobacco, accept the risks and have no intention of giving it up.

That's why this particular lifelong nonsmoker sees something unsavory going on. Our long war against tobacco is being turned into a war against tobacco users. It has gone far beyond a serious health concern and become a moral issue.

It's personal now. We're no longer merely annoyed at smokers. Today we despise them. In some Oregon communities, we've even begun persecuting them.

Eugene and Corvallis, for example, have cracked down so severely on smokers it's illegal for them to gather socially anywhere indoors in public and light up, except in tobacco shops. No private smoking club, even if it employs only smokers, may open for business. No tiny Mom and Pop pub, where both Mom and Pop are smokers, may cater to their kind.

Last fall, the Eugene City Council voted 6-2 against allowing businesses to build enclosed, ventilated rooms where customers could smoke without bothering others, including employees. Corvallis won't allow that, either.

The vendetta doesn't stop there. Eugene encourages anyone spotting a smoking violation to report it on a telephone snitch line. Corvallis banned even "smokeless" chewing tobacco, which harms only the user, in all public places, including bars and taverns. A hodgepodge of state, local laws Such local laws began spreading among Oregon cities and counties in 1998, after California enacted a statewide smoking ban in all workplaces, including pubs and cocktail lounges and the stinkiest lowlife dive. Last month, though, the trend screeched to a halt in Oregon when the Legislature -- under tremendous pressure from all sides in the tobacco war -- passed a controversial compromise. The new statewide law allows smoking bans to continue in Corvallis and Eugene and the handful of other cities and counties that previously adopted them, while prohibiting any other local governments from following suit. Instead, the rest of Oregon is subject to a statewide ban, modeled after a Multnomah County ordinance that outlaws smoking in workplaces except bars, taverns, restaurant lounges, bingo halls, racetracks, tobacco shops and bowling alleys.

The beleaguered Oregon smoker now faces a baffling patchwork of local and state laws. He can have a cigarette in a Eugene park or a Grants Pass bar, but not in a Eugene bar or a Grants Pass park. He can puff tobacco in a Lincoln City bingo parlor or cocktail lounge, but not anywhere in Tillamook County, except within the city limits of Bay City, Garibaldi and Nehalem.

Got all that? Before lighting up, you'd better consult a lawyer.

"At some point it just gets ridiculous," says Bill Perry, lobbyist for the Oregon Restaurant Association. Some of his clients are taking an unfair financial beating through what he calls "the zealotry of people who oppose smoking."

Talk like that can get you killed in Kabul. In enlightened Oregon, it merely gets you branded as a heretic who's probably taking money from Big Tobacco.

For the record, Perry doesn't smoke, doesn't accept payments from tobacco companies and doesn't think smoking is good for human beings.

"Of course not," he says. "Even secondhand smoke is harmful. Children should never start smoking. It is an awful habit."

It's also entirely legal. Protecting nonsmokers is welcome and wise, but Perry sees danger in legislating suppression of lawful conduct that offends our notion of what constitutes appropriate behavior. Driving down the road to smoke That's what we've done in Oregon's two leading college towns, and nowhere is it more glaring than at the Peacock Tavern in downtown Corvallis. The Peacock is a microcosm of all that is wrong with the tyranny of the majority deciding that adults who smoke -- about 20 percent of the nation's population -- are prohibited from gathering socially in public to engage in their habit.

"We thought of opening a private club for smokers upstairs, employing only smokers, but the city won't even let us do that," says Randy Flugstad, the Peacock's manager. "Instead, what we have on our busiest nights is a small crowd, 20 to 30 smokers, standing out front on the sidewalk around a butt can."

The Peacock, a 75-year-old Oregon landmark with the capacity for 480 customers, has been decimated by the city's smoking ordinance. Owner John Carter says the business has lost 38 percent of its lottery income and more than half of its basic bar revenue since the law took effect. Employment at the Peacock, he said, has dropped from 50 to 14.

State records support Carter's lament about lost business. Video-poker revenue has plunged dramatically at The Peacock and other Corvallis watering holes while shooting up at nearby establishments outside the city limits.

"Our former customers are going out of town now," Carter says. "That includes the legal-age college kids, who are driving to the Buzzsaw in Albany because they can smoke there."

That's a scary claim. And it's supported by a letter sent to the Albany City Council by Laura Lee Beck, regional director of Linn County's "Drugs-Drinking-Driving-Don't" program. Cautioning Albany against rushing to join the anti-tobacco brigade, she pointed out that DUI arrests shot up 91 percent in Linn and Benton counties in the year after Corvallis enacted its smoking ban in 1998.

"We all know smoking is bad for you, but I smoke and I don't have an employee who doesn't smoke," Carter says. "It's a choice, a matter of personal responsibility. What's next? Telling us which books and magazines we can read?"

As he spoke in the dim light of his tavern one warm summer afternoon, The Peacock was virtually empty. Its six pool tables stood silent and deserted. Its long bar faced 20 empty stools. Its five video-poker machines sat idle and alone.

If the city's new ordinance has made the venerable tavern safe at last for the tens of thousands of Corvallis adults who don't smoke, where were they? They certainly weren't at the Peacock.

In Eugene, the city smoking ban just took effect July 1, but some taverns and bars there are already reeling. Their customers are fleeing to next-door Springfield, where the new statewide law will still allow smokers to light up in bars, restaurant lounges, bowling alleys and bingo parlors. Anti-smoking folks fan the flames Not surprisingly, many leaders of the anti-smoking movement detest the new legislation. They're urging Gov. John Kitzhaber to veto it. They're incensed it doesn't permit the Eugene-Corvallis smoking-ban model to spread.

"Not only will children be able to breathe in the 4,000 chemicals contained in secondhand smoke," activists wrote in op-ed pieces published in The Oregonian and The Register-Guard of Eugene, "but they will also be able to see adults exhibiting that smoking is an accepted type of behavior."

They make a convincing case about children and secondhand smoke. Parents would be wise to keep their children out of the bars and the relatively few other smoky places that survive under Oregon's new law, which Kitzhaber says he'll sign.

But the anti-tobacco Taliban treads on dangerous ground in its attempt to decree that smoking isn't "an accepted type of behavior." To the contrary, it's entirely legal. So are green lawns, abortion, casino gambling, extramarital sex, interracial marriage and the possession of assault rifles, SUVs, "The Satanic Verses" and other supposedly heretical literature.

In this country you're welcome to abhor such things in your home or house of worship, but when the mullahs stray from regulating health to legislating morality, we're all heading for trouble.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Associate Editor Doug Bates can be reached at 503-221-8174 or by e-mail at dougbates@news.oregonian.com.