Gwen Leifer remembers the experience of that first fit years ago, the way it made her feel intensely uncomfortable all over.

She was a teen then, standing in a ticket line for a Felt Forum performance by the alternative rock band Echo and the Bunnymen. The smoke from others' cigarettes sickened her. "I felt this tingling in my hands and face, like pins and needles all over me," recalled Leifer, 33, a lawyer from Forest Hills. "A friend took me to the paramedics backstage and they said my blood pressure was way up over 200." Though never a smoker herself, she struggled for several years thereafter with occasional attacks from secondhand smoke. Eventually, a doctor diagnosed her problem as an extreme chemical sensitivity to cigarettes, a condition that caused not only the tingling reaction, but also her high blood pressure, she said. Worse, she has asthma, another condition that smoke can aggravate. There was nothing she could do, she said, except cocoon herself at home on many a weekend night, when her friends were out having a good time and meeting people. "I stopped going to bars, dance clubs, comedy clubs," she said. "Even small restaurants with smoking areas, that was out." March 30 - the day the smoking ban takes effect in city restaurants, bars, nightclubs and offices - will be a day of liberation for people like Leifer. At long last, those who suffer extreme adverse reactions to secondhand smoke will be able to mingle at bars or attend birthday parties in restaurants, perhaps offsetting the much-feared financial losses that social establishments fear will result from the ban. Asked if she has sympathy for soon-to-be banished smokers, Leifer was less than forgiving. If the urge for the noxious weed is too much for them to resist when they're dining at a restaurant or imbibing at a bar, they'll still have other options - such as donning a nicotine patch, jawing nicotine gum, or simply stepping out to light up, she said. People with health conditions like hers have had no options other than staying home. "You have the right to harm yourself, I guess," Leifer said. "But I don't think you have a right to harm other people."

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