Let me be clear about this: I don’t smoke, I have never smoked, and I have serious questions about people who, in this day and age, continue to smoke despite years of warnings about all the bad things that tobacco does to your body.

But I don’t agree with the misguided notion that passive smoke is some sort of crime against humanity. As a nonsmoker, I don’t like smoke in my face but I also don’t think it’s fair that our nanny society seems to want to treat smokers like they’re lepers by making it harder for them to find a place to puff.

I find the over-the-top anti-smoking zealots to be far worse for my health than any passive smoke I might run into. Their holier-than-thou rhetoric and action increases my blood pressure, and it fails to recognize the basic principle of dealing with humans: We’re human. Stopping smoking is tough for even the most motivated person to follow through with, and I am reminded of my winters in Great Falls, Montana, when the smokers congregated for a puff outside the back door of the newspaper in 15-below temperatures. Think they would be out there freezing to death if quitting was all that easy?

The push to get smokers to quit has changed over the years, and the newest trick is also the most insidious: Don’t hire smokers. We’ve reported on this in Workforce Management, but what started with a trickle of organizations taking this approach is now spreading, as this story from The Cincinnati Enquirer seems to indicate.

Although most companies still try to use smoking-cessation programs as the way to get employees healthier, Cincinnati-based USI, an insurance and financial services company, now tests new employees when they’re hired. If you smoke and show no signs of trying to stop, you don’t get the job.

“We decided not to hire smokers because they add additional expense to our health plan and our ongoing operation,” said Dennis Curran, chief human resources officer for USI’s Midwestern region.

The Enquirer story points to a USI job candidate by the name of Jamie Holleman. She had applied for a commercial lines account manager position, “interviewed in March, then withdrew as a job candidate after it became clear that the smoking policy would be an obstacle. But the company called again in July and asked if she would enter a smoking-cessation class. She now takes weekly classes at St. Luke Hospital. ‘I was shocked,’ Holleman said of her reaction when she first heard USI’s position. ‘But I had actually been talking to a friend of mine about quitting.’ ”

Here’s an interesting side element to this story: Although you can deny a smoker a job in Cincinnati, it’s illegal to do so across the Ohio River in the tobacco-growing commonwealth of Kentucky.

The Bluegrass State considers smokers to be a protected class and according to The Enquirer, “a law on the books for several decades in Kentucky, one of the nation’s leading tobacco-growing states, says it would be illegal for an employer ‘to require as a condition of employment that any employee or applicant for employment abstain from smoking or using tobacco products outside the course of employment, as long as the person complies with any workplace policy concerning smoking.’ ”

The story also points to another issue in this debate: that the laws about using workplace hiring policies to regulate behavior such as smoking are evolving. “Courts haven’t quite figured out what to do with it,” Justin Flamm, a partner at Taft, Stettinius & Hollister, told the newspaper.

If you’re like me and feel that the anti-smoking zealots have run amok and gone too far, perhaps the better approach is the one most sensible companies follow: Encourage workers to do whatever they can to take better care of their health, whether it be losing weight, exercising more or giving up the smoking habit.

Some companies have even gone so far as to offer financial encouragement to workers who try to get healthier. That’s certainly a more sensible approach and one that is more likely to work. In my many years of management experience, policies that punish people for all-too-human behavior are doomed to fail. That’s something I wish the anti-smoking zealots would remember. You get more positive action by encouraging people to change their ways than you do by wasting brain cells in pursuit of new ways to punish them.