Smokers long ago became the Skulking Class, the world having conspired to force their membership.

They skulk around back doors of buildings, or huddle on sidewalks outside their places of business to smoke, talking no doubt of Skulkery, oppression and the unbreakable grip of nicotine.

That is because they have been banned from civilized society in just about every square inch of San Diego, indoors and outdoors, so that public places open to them to light up are scarce. The situation practically cries out for skulking.

In North San Diego County, particularly in that sprawling enclave known as Oceanside, smokers are about to be bopped again. The City Council has voted to ban smoking on Oceanside beaches, which in nearly all other ways are the best in the world.

One may pity the skulkers, but Oceanside has done the right thing (assuming a later, "final" vote does not turn things around). Smoking kills. If you must, call the right to smoke another personal freedom lost to government.

But smoking kills; 400,000 Americans who smoke die each from its pretty awful effects, principally lung cancer, the data supplied with no pleasure at all by the American Cancer Society.

Somehow, if smokers want to kill themselves in this way -- they all knew it would get them in the end, and smoked anyway -- that might be all right. Nutso, to be sure, but OK; the rights of the individual are paramount. And so on.

But it is not all right for them and their smoke to kill nonsmokers. They do it, you know: 53,000 nonsmoking Americans die each year from the effects of secondhand smoke. It can be picked up inside buildings or outside. If the smoke can be detected, it can do you in.

No sane person wants to be killed so that others may exhale. It's tantamount to murder, or, if the word seems harsh, it's like manslaughter. By any other name, it's death, and smokers have no right to lay death on us.

Thanks to the Oceanside City Council for the vote. It will save lives. That is an admirable stance.

Characteristically, the council came late to the party. The city of San Diego several years ago banned smoking on its beaches and public places. Up and down the Pacific shore in this northern reach similar bans have been in place for some time. Solana Beach was among the first.

Let's take a short break and consider the smokers and their plight. Apart from the insidious hold that nicotine has on smokers, smoking is in some ways a marvelous pastime.

It is theater and therapy. It gives smokers something to do with their hands. It makes coffee and tuna-salad sandwiches taste a lot better, or at least it completes a historically urgent triangle.

It can prevent awful rows or resignations: One or two long drags helps some people not punch out the boss or kick pigeons in the park.

Smoke has been known to increase production. It helps the incurable overweight lose weight. It helps soothe the nervous. It helps the years go by.

Add all of this up, and it's a plight, even if the examples of "marvelous" are a shade on the fanciful side. But the theater part stands up: What smoker has not inhaled with purpose, then exhaled with a dramatic sweep of the arm to make a point of some thespian origin or other? Think Roz Russell, think Bogart and Bacall.

This last material was only for balance. The whole and only truth is: Smoking is a disaster for the smokers and the smellers. All of science has come to understand that, and most of the populace.

Curiously, while the lethal terrors that smoking held in store were not well known 60 and 70 years ago, society at that time disapproved on other grounds. The odor, for example.

Burma Shave had it right. Its signs on country roadways -- little signs about 50 yards apart, stuck on fences, each containing one line of a cautionary verse -- proclaimed in the 1940s: "The lips that touch the cigaroot will never rest beneath my snoot. -- Burma Shave"

There were other verses -- Burma Shave was nothing if not inventive -- but many families of smokers and nonsmokers alike memorized that particular one. Catchy. The kids said it over and over, and never quite got it until their first kiss from a smoker. And never forgot that, either.

Where the Skulking Class will repair to in Oceanside, once the beach is off-limits to its members, is a mystery; they can't all fit into public restrooms.

Perhaps they will take long walks, trying to cup the cigarettes in their palms lest the law or the overalert spot them. They can walk and walk, and pretty soon they'll come to a building that will have no choice but to let them in. They'll have no choice, either.

They'll enter, passing just beneath the building's sign over the door.

"Oncology," it will say.

Contact columnist John Van Doorn at (760) 739-6647 or jvandoorn@nctimes.com.