I MUST CONFESS that I never really thought of death by smoking as an asset to the economy. But then, I also never considered blow-up dolls as a human rights issue, so I do seem to have gotten a wee bit out of step with the rest of life.

Either that, or sanity has taken a ride on a No. 9 bus in London and gotten lost. Or perhaps I'm actually on the planet Zog and the place is a home for the bewildered run by the inmates.

After all, sitting out here in the leafy countryside among the cow turds and aroma of liquid manure and the fuchsias and rhododendrons and other things that I can't spell, it's easy to lose track of the real world of George Bush and drive-by shootings and five bucks a gallon gasoline.

I haven't always been so out of touch. As a sometimes son of North Carolina, I've long been aware of the wealth that is tobacco. One isn't castigated for missing the exact price of burley on a given day, or mishearing the final yodel at an auction, without being made abundantly aware that a lot of folding stuff is at stake here - and it ain't all tobacco.

Nor have I been remiss in my support of the leaf industry, at least not since I left Duke University and no longer had the tobacco flaks dropping by on campus to deliver freebie cartons of the coffin nails by the score. Fags here now run about $3.60 per pack.

Actually, one of the main reasons that I am sitting here at my country cottage amid the turds and honeysuckles and rhodys, etc., is that cigarettes damned near killed me. They did land me in the hospital with heart disease, ruined cardiac plumbing and the like. Plus a cough that had the resonance of a death rattle.

After the obligatory triple bypass heart surgery and getting the X-rays (that I still have around) of the metal stitches that still keep my rib cage from coming apart and dumping heart, lungs and assorted viscera all over the carpet, I deemed it a wise idea to give up the fire weed.

At the time, I was doing about three-plus packs of Marlboros a day and my wife Elizabeth one all on her own. When I did the numbers with a calculator that I got from a tobacco dealer, I figured we were spending something in excess of $14,000 a year.

That's the money that bought Chard Cottage - and still pays the mortgage - after we both flushed the habit, about a week apart. Whenever the occasional crave comes on, we sniff a rose or a gardenia, and remember.

Now it seems I have committed some form of economic treason, at least in the eyes of the world's biggest tobacco company. Philip Morris has suggested to the Czech Republic that tobacco can save its economy millions of dollars on health care because smokers die early.

What the company said was: "Our principal finding is that the negative financial effects of smoking, such as increased health care costs, are more than offset by positive effects such as excise tax and value-added tax collected on tobacco products."

In other words, savings in health care and pension costs far outweigh the tab for looking after sick smokers. The Philip Morris report suggested that in the case of the Czech Republic, that country saves about $150 million a year because smoking Czechs die early, and cancelled Czechs are no longer an economic burden.

I'm not really au courant with the finer points of the Czech economy, but I do know the economic aspects of tobacco have the British economy in a quandary - and it's why, no matter how bad scientists say the things are for us, cigarettes will never be banned in this country.

The hard truth is that for every dollar, or pound sterling, that sick smokers cost Britain's National Health Service, the government rakes in 4 bucks, pounds or whatever in taxes on the tobacco products they use. The profits go into funding - you guessed it - the NHS.

In Britain, as in Czech land, a dead smoker is no longer a burden on the economy - but also he or she (there are lots more female smokers these days) is no longer contributing to it, and on balance they are more valuable alive and smoking than dead and not.

So I am, in fact, a double burden on the government - an ex-smoker who is no longer paying tobacco tax but who is still refusing to die and is instead collecting a pension. I would feel right bad about all this, but then I catch a whiff of the rhododendrons and survey the cow turds piling up in yonder field.

When it comes to crisis, blow-up dolls are not exactly in the same league as cigarettes, but nonetheless they, too, can exercise the governmental conscience, this time on the judicial level. In England, a human rights case is being built around an inflatable doll.

The trouble started when what were described as "high-spirited" folks at a town pub were caught larking about with a blow-up doll, making, ah, rather rude advances on the female-shaped thing. A lady passerby objected and complained to the local cops.

The question before the beleaguered judge was whether playing about with an inflatable sex doll amounted to an indecent public display or was legitimate freedom of expression.

The judge ruled that to convict would be a violation of European human rights and threw the case out of court.

Forget the rhododendrons. I think I need something a lot stronger if I am to cope with the realities of the 21st century. I suppose a cigarette would be out of the question...

Thought for the Week: Until you walk in another man's moccasins, you can't imagine the smell.

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