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ATTLEBORO -In March, Andre Lambert entered Arbour-Fuller Hospital depressed - then, left addicted.

Now, he's up to a pack of cigarettes a day, 20 years after quitting smoking.

Lambert's wife, Pauline, and the private May Street hospital disagree about who is responsible.

Pauline Lambert says patients get cigarettes by walking up to a counter, where an Arbour-Fuller social worker or other staffer dispenses them from the patients' personal supply.

However, if a patient doesn't have his or her own cigarettes, or can't afford them, free cigarettes from a supply left behind by former patients are handed out, she said. Practice witnessed

Lambert says she has seen the practice, herself. She said her husband was given cigarettes she knows were not his own.

Hospital spokeswoman Judy Merel flatly denies that assertion.

Merel said if Andre Lambert had access to cigarettes, another patient may have given him the smokes. She said the issue has never before arisen, at least in recent memory.

And the Massachusetts Department of Public Health has "never heard of a situation like this," spokesman Tom Lyons said.

"It's certainly not something we would encourage," he said.

The state requires acute care facilities to be smoke-free, although they may have designated smoking areas, Lyons said.

Either way, Andre Lambert is hooked on cigarettes again.

"He hasn't been able to quit. In fact, he's got a very addictive personality. I think that goes hand in hand with his depression," said Pauline Lambert, an administrative assistant at a private high school.

"I would like to prevent it from happening to future patients." A former self-employed home inspector, Andre Lambert has been disabled for about a year because of depression, his wife said.

Lambert said her husband typically goes to Butler Hospital in Providence.

However, he checked into Arbor-Fuller as an inpatient on March 7 after space was unavailable at Butler.

Lambert said she saw Andre smoking again while visiting him about a day later.

"I saw him being handed the cigarettes," Lambert said.

Lambert said she had seen Andre get a cigarette from the hospital about a year earlier, but didn't raise concerns at that time because "I wasn't really sure what was happening."

But after the recent incident, Lambert said she spoke with hospital patient advocate Lisa Dunne, who told her that Andre was within his patient rights to have a cigarette.

Lambert said a hospital staff member declined her request to keep cigarettes from her husband.

But Merel said, "the hospital does not give cigarettes to patients."

"If there is access to cigarettes, it would be a patient-to-patient issue," Merel said.

Merel added that while Lambert "was upset about it, this was the husband's decision."

Pauline Lambert said the hospital is "trying to cover their butt."

"My husband was in with a guy who said he never smoked in his life. Where he got hooked was right there, because they were giving out these free cigarettes."

Lambert said that when she asked a staff member to put a cigarette ban on Andre's chart, "one patient said to me, 'What are you trying to do, ruin it for the rest of us?'"

The staff member's "response to me was, 'He's a grown man. He can decide for himself,'" Lambert said.

Lambert says she doesn't see it that way.

"When he's in that state, he doesn't think right. He just acts impulsively," she said.

"He has anxiety about us not being able to afford the cigarettes. It's causing a hardship for us financially," she said.

Bridgewater State College psychology professor Elizabeth Englander said that based on her experience, "many people smoke in mental hospitals."

Englander said that while she was unfamiliar with the Lambert case, she added that "he was probably inundated with other smokers and picked up the habit again."

Andre Lambert was admitted recently to Butler rather than Arbour-Fuller.