My name is Joe Nance and I used to smoke cigarettes. I picked up that habit when I was 18 years old, mainly to get the extra break time that smokers were allowed at my workplace. It quickly became a regular thing for me to have a lit cigarette in my mouth whenever I wasn’t indoors, and within two years I was smoking two packs every day. For the next fourteen years I kept that habit, and my health slowly degraded. Around 2004 I decided that the cigarettes weren’t doing anything good for me, and that I was tired of being out of breath all the time, so I simply didn’t buy any cigarettes that morning. Within four hours I had snapped at everybody on my crew at least once and had threatened one of them with bodily harm. At lunch time I picked up a pack of smokes and gave up the thought of quitting cold-turkey. A few months later I looked into FDA-approved cessation methods. The nicotine gums were awful and hurt my teeth, the nicotine lozenges tasted horrid, nicotine patches made me dizzy and disoriented, and after reading a number of testimonials from people who had used Chantix I was far more afraid of that drug than I would ever have been of cigarettes. None of the recommended methods worked for me, and I gave up any thought of quitting. I was convinced that I’d be a smoker for the rest of my life, and die wheezing with emphysema, as many of my relatives had before. And then in 2012 I was asked by a friend if I’d tried e-cigarettes to at least cut down the harm that tobacco was doing to me. It made me scoff. I’d heard of e-cigs before, and seen them in the convenience stores. Never saw anybody buying them, though. It had to be some gimmick. There’s no possible way that they could satisfy a hardcore smoker like me. And then that friend told me how he had used e-cigs to quit his smoking habit. Not only that but he also pointed me to a mutual friend of ours who did the same thing. In the next week I asked him every single question that came to mind, searched for youtube videos, found various forums and chat rooms for e-cig users, asked even more questions. And just after Christmas I went and got myself a starter kit. Since that day I’ve smoked less than 15 cigarettes, in a time period when I would have smoked more than six thousand. I no longer wheeze when I sleep, or cough when I awaken. I have much more energy, and far fewer sick days. I can run around with my dogs without getting winded after mere seconds. My sense of smell and taste are returning. In short, I feel better now than I did in my 20s. And at no point did I feel anxious or irritable because I couldn’t have a cigarette. The improvements have been nearly miraculous. And I don’t think I could have ever known this feeling without electronic cigarettes.