I used to smoke a pack a day, or, more accurately, as many cigarettes as I could get my hands on. 

That’s right — I was cool. Nowadays, I’ve all but quit, averaging one every week or two. I’m no nicotine-free saint, but even though I occasionally text the Marlboro Man at two in the morning, at least I’ve never done more than a one-night stand with Cancer Robot 2000 in any of his artificially flavorful forms. 

That’s right, I’m talking about the moist demons themselves — e-cigarettes. “Cigarettes 2” is a sequel that our society doesn’t need, even less so than “Transformers 4.” 

It’s time to take a stand against this “Terminator 2: Judgment Day”-scale menace and let the noble tobacco cigarette die in peace over the next decade or so, just like so many of its victims. 

Cigarettes are great in a lot of ways. They’re instant relief sticks that you carry around in your pocket, without the social baggage or more immediate harm of hard drugs or a personal masturbator. 

When you smoke, you’re immediately a part of a community that gets extra breaks at work because they physically need them to function. Most importantly, they’re the best after great sex.

If I had to pick the one big drawback about cigs, it would be the nearly 500,000 deaths they cause annually in the U.S. alone, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The American Cancer Society says that tobacco use is to blame for a global death toll of 6 million people every year. 

According to the CDC, most U.S. smokers are trying to quit, and more quit each year. E-cigarettes are presented as a healthier alternative that helps smokers end their addiction.

But even if they are healthier, e-cigarettes are way too lame to be worth it. They present a direction for our future that we should stop at all costs — a future that lacks creativity, progression and self-awareness of the fact that we’re actively perpetuating the greatest plague of our time. 

We need to move past cigarettes of all kinds and find new vices for this era, ones that generate different conversations about our humanity and how to comport ourselves as a society. 

That won’t happen as long we allow e-cigs to become a cultural staple. More and more kids try e-cigs every year, in large part because they’re targeted by e-cig advertising, prolonging the life of the cigarette. 

Electric car? E-book? Both are great inventions that preserve old technologies for the future. Electronic cigarettes? You’re just validating a useless vice with wasted technology. 

E-cig popularity has scarred the face of our community. There are not one, not two, but three ECig Crib locations in our state, and my uncle won’t stop talking about them. How are we supposed to convince any tourist that we’re a better option than Seattle when we force them to confront such horrors during their visits? The answer is that we can’t, friends.