I can honestly count on one hand the number of friends I have who DON’T smoke. Most of them started when they were in high school so, now in their twenties, they’re coming up on a decade of tobacco dependence — not the sort of occasion that calls for an ice cream cake.

A few months back, while having a few beers at a pub in North County (we, of course, had to sit outside so they could smoke), I looked around the table and realized that not only were we all getting older but that my friends had been roped in by tobacco for nearly one-third of their lives. What was once edgy and cool and potentially led to a prom date in high school, was now causing my friends to be banished outside like dogs, where the only women that came our way were working on their 4th Cosmo, their 5th marriage and their 2nd pack.

Although I was never mesmerized by it, I think my friends all came to the realization that night that the glamor of the cigarette had worn off. Older, addicted and generally unhappy with the effects, they had all separately expressed their desire to quit to me on multiple occasions. So this night, I decided to address them as a group and call them out on their bullsh-t proclamations of wanting to stop.

All in all, it went well. They all agreed that they wanted to quit and they agreed to finally take action.

Fast forward about 3 months…

I invite my friends over to watch some cheesy B-movies (you have to love Bruce Campbell), and they all pile in my apartment and take over the couches. To this point, none of them had quit but they had all “cut back” (which is code word for smoking literally two less cigarettes per day in an attempt to justify their continued use) but tonight was unusual. It was odd because nobody made a straight shot for my balcony to light up. Instead, we got out the chips, popped in a DVD and got down to business.

Then, almost as though it were choreographed, they all reach into their pockets and pull out their new E-cigs. I paused the movie. Every single one of my idiot friends looked like a pig who just happened upon a fresh pile of sh-t. Sitting there, gleefully gloating at the fact that they can enjoy the fleeting rush of inhaling nicotine without having to put on shoes or a hoody. Of course, if you know anyone who uses an E-cig then you know all the phrases they use to justify why this is a much better choice than cigarettes.

“It’s vapor instead of smoke.”
“It’s much healthier than sucking in all those chemicals.”
“It’s cheaper in the long run.”
“I can smoke indoors now!”
Or, my personal favorite: “I’m going to use this to help me quit the real smokes.”

Now, there is some truth to these claims but you all know as well as I do that the second the cartridge runs out on that E-cig, they have some 2-for-1 Parliaments ready to go. They’ll choke those down until they can ‘go pick up some more cartridges,’ and who the F knows when that will be.

For the time being, though, they’re content sitting on my couch, sucking on those ridiculous little plastic E-cigs like babies with their pacifiers. Those things light up when you inhale and even make that burning sound that a real drag on a cig makes; it must be the same feeling for smokers as when Nintendo introduced Gameboy to throngs of Zelda-crazed nerds. It’s not going to help anyone quit, why would it? E-cigs provide an equal amount of nicotine as smokes but allow the user to ’smoke’ anywhere he/she pleases, which means they’ll use them more often thanks to convenience.

Like I said before, cigarettes never seemed glamorous to me but with the introduction of the E-cig, my friends can once again sit inside the bar with everyone else. While they may not be banished outside to partake of their dirty habit, now they can all whip out their age 18+ glorified toys and broadcast their addiction to every single lady in the place.

If it was ever glamorous for them to smoke, I didn’t see it.Now older and wiser, I see people who are so addicted to nicotine that they’ll publicly suck a toy cig just so they don’t have to go outside; because once you grow up a little, smoking behind the bleachers isn’t the renegade image it once was and depending on a plastic savior is a sad but true testament to having some growing up to do still.