Every neighborhood has that house the kids go to after school, the one where the parents are never home. In my neighborhood it was Dana??s. On the bus ride home from our high school to the condo development where we lived, the question was always the same: ??you going to Dana??s later?? Dana??s mom worked, and I don??t think anyone knew where (or who) her dad was. She lived on the second floor of a now-thoroughly-pass?? Toll Brothers condo in suburban New Jersey. Every day after school her place would be crowded by high schoolers wearing flannel shirts and frayed jeans. Some arrived on bmx bikes and others on skateboards. Oasis, Nine Inch Nails, The Smashing Pumpkins, and Powerman 5000 were all things. Hemp bracelets were also a thing. Dana??s was the place where I got really stupid drunk for the first time, met my first ??serious? girlfriend, and learned how to play poker. I also smoked my first cigarette there. My slightly older brother passed me a wrinkled Newport 100 and said, ??it kind of burns but it also feels kind of nice.? I was 14 years old. I once quit smoking successfully for year. It was a pretty low stress year but the moment my stress level spiked I was back to smoking. That year aside, I??ve smoked a pack a day pretty much every day from the day I smoked that Newport at Dana’s, straight on through to two years ago when I found electronic cigarettes. It??s hard to explain to a non-smoker what it??s like to be addicted to cigarettes. For a smoker, going without nicotine is like going without food. You feel a hunger for it, and even after the physical addiction is broken you live with absolute certainty that you??ll feel the pang again one day. Something very emotional will happen. A family member will be in the hospital, or you??ll have a rough breakup, and the only thing that will really calm your soul is a cup of coffee and a cigarette. I tried to quit dozens of times and was only successful once, for a year.. in a very low stress year. I tried gum, patches, cold turkey. Everything. Satisfying the nicotine addiction is a pleasant experience, but nothing else about smoking is pleasant. Your clothes smell, random people in the street stop to say nasty things to you, food doesn??t taste as good, you get more colds, your teeth yellow, you find yourself outside in a cold rain while others are enjoying themselves at the party. You become something different, undesirable. Something between a cadaver and a victim of apartheid. For me, finding electronic cigarettes was a miracle. I might never kick my dependence on nicotine, but with electronic cigarettes virtually every negative aspect of smoking has been mitigated or completely removed. There is no smell, no heckling, no crowding under an awning to avoid the rain. I opened a package of flour tortillas in the kitchen the other day and I smelled their aroma wafting from the package. Did you know that uncooked tortillas have a scent, and that they smell as delicious as they taste? I’m 30 and I just learned that. I also run now. At any earlier time in my life running felt like drinking a bottle of whiskey and then swallowing a match. Now it feels good. The first time I ran I made it about 2 kilometers, and I felt really proud of myself. Now I run from the front door of my apartment in Brooklyn to nearby Prospect Park, around the park and back home. That??s almost 10k and that??s my regular run. Needless to say, this never would have happened if I were still smoking cigarettes. And, by the way, thanks to running I??ve lost 30 pounds. It is hard for me to stress how much electronic cigarettes have improved my life. They??ve got nicotine in them, so of course they should be kept away from kids –If I had a time machine my first destination would be Dana??s condo so I could slap that Newport out of my own hand– but for those of us who are already addicted to nicotine, those of us who have earnestly tried to quit and cannot, electronic cigarettes are a potentially life-saving and unequivocally life-improving product.