Formatting Date to Eastern Time

Howdy!

I am having trouble getting the date into EST time. Right now, I am using this line of code:

$comment_time = mysql2date(' F jS, Y @ g:ia', $comment->comment_date,false);

The date that gets posted is 5 hours ahead of my time. I need to do it this way because I am not using the loop or else I would just call date(); Whenever I call date() in the loop, I get the correct time, but that’s not what I need.

Any help would be appreciated!