It happened again just a few days ago. At a stoplight, a disembodied hand dangled out the window of the car ahead, holding a cigarette. The cigaretted hand moved inside and outside the car as its female owner puffed away. Then, as inevitably as finding an earwig under a damp rock, the exhausted butt was dropped out the window.

This scene can ruin a perfectly good drive. As tolerant as I try to be, the littering smoker is the one person for whom I believe no punishment devised by man is too cruel. They all should be strung up by their short hairs. Or at least shouted at loudly.

What kind of person does this? What kind of brain justifies the act of throwing any litter out a car window, never mind a lit stick that could set something on fire? What exactly are they telling themselves?

It can take up to 20 years for a cigarette butt to become one with the Earth, so don’t give me “it’s biodegradable.” In the meantime the rest of us have to look at that ugly, stubby piece of garbage lying in the street, or we have to pay someone to pick it up.

In researching this peeve, I found it hard to believe that not a single federal government agency tracks America’s litter problem, not even the Environmental Protection Agency. The best we can do to understand its breadth is to examine some organizational and state findings.

Every year, the Ocean Conservancy sponsors an International Coastal Cleanup, during which volunteers from 100 countries pick up tons of debris along the world’s shorelines. In 2006, 29 percent of the trash removed was smoking related.

I remember vividly being at a Florida beach a few years back, putting my hands in the cool sand, just to enjoy the feeling, and lifting up cigarette butts as I pulled my hands out. Someone took a public space and made it their own trash pile, then left. I’m guessing that these are the same people who fail to appreciate what they really look like in a Speedo.

Despite my civil libertarian leanings, I applaud Sarasota County for considering a smoking ban or designated smoking areas on its beaches. So many smokers litter with such uncaring abandon that they have forfeited the right to share these public recreation areas with their habit. In 2000, volunteers in that county picked up 32 pounds of cigarette butts on the beach. The world is their ashtray.

And it is not just the debris. On more than one occasion I have had to pack up and move to another area of a beach to avoid the smoke whiffed by someone nearby who decided to pollute the air for everyone.

I’ve never been a smoker, so I don’t understand this umbilical attachment to something so nauseating, though I do have some compassion for addicts of any stripe. But where my patience runs thin is with this sense of entitlement that so many smokers seem to have. I no longer lean back in my seat on an airplane because it is likely to impose on the person sitting behind me. Smokers, though, have little concern about who might be in their line of smoke. They puff away while walking down a street, their smoke streaming behind them into the face of the poor sop in the rear. Nice.

Anyone who thinks I am unfairly picking on the litter of smokers, since there is so much other debris tossed into the streets by big lunkheads, should take a look at a survey done by the state of Washington. The 2004 study found that cigarette butts were the number one most littered item, at 480 million per year. It hardly seems possible, since the state has only about 1.2 million smokers. But Megan Warfield of the state’s Department of Ecology assured me it’s true.

Warfield says that in follow-up focus groups, smokers excuse their behavior by saying they throw the butts out the window because they don’t like the smell in their car. “I think that’s so ironic,” Warfield says. She also notes that the state has had tremendous problems with brush and forest fires started by tossed cigarettes – an act that now carries a fine of $1,025.

When I see someone drop a cigarette butt on the ground I have an autonomic reaction whereby I ascribe a long list of other loathsome attributes to that person – selfish jerk being the kindest. They obviously care about as much about the health and beauty of the planet as they do their own.

One day we will find a cure for tobacco addiction and this filthy habit will be easy to kick. Let’s just hope the other filthy habit dies along with it.