An update: I did sign up for the smoking cessation classes, had the first one a couple of days ago. Since there will be several of them, I decided to initially lay low, be quiet, and learn what I could. And maybe get some free gum... I am still evangelistic about
vaping, and want to tell smokers, but as several pointed out, it can be hard to buck HR. More about HR later.
It was sponsored by our county health department, in a town of 125k. There is a regular smoking cessation division. Our presenter was a girl in her mid-20's, sort of a stereotypical sales type. She was cute and perky, and said "Super!!!" a lot. She had never smoked, this was just a job.
They had goody bags of Jolly Rancher candy, squeezy foam stress balls, cinnamon toothpicks (used to love those as a kid) to hand out. Their presentation material was good, it pointed out things that most at ECF know or have learned. Smoking has triggers, learn about them, address them. Smoking is bad, and usually kills or greatly harms people. In addition to physical addiction, there are patterns and rituals involved.
The literature was also good. Since NRT was mentioned from the start, it made big points about saying that nicotine "isn't that bad". It specifically stated that it does not cause cancer, can increase heart rate in some people, etc. Again, this is well-discussed information on ECF. Looking for fine print on the literature, I saw it was "brought to you by
Genentech, a division of
Roche. I wasn't familiar initially with Genentech, but knew that Roche was Big Pharma, so there is our real sponsor right there. I had already decided to keep quiet about
vaping, but I knew most of the smokers in attendance, so I could approach them later, now that I know they want to quit. As with any method of smoking cessation, you have to want to, or nothing will work.
I had a close call on being outed as a non-smoker, however! We all had personal work sheets where we wrote down our triggers and goals. I made up appropriate answers, as a long-time smoker would. They passed around a CO2 breathalyzer thing, for us to record our CO2 levels. They explained that a non-smoker typically has a level of 1-5, smokers typically have a level in the 20's, and 80+ is death. I am not sure if this was an actual measurement in parts per million, or just a readout number on the machine. Everyone passed it around (with new mouthpieces), and wrote down their numbers. I blew a zero.
The girl came around to replace the mouthpiece, and double-taked at my reading of zero. She asked "when was your last cigarette?". It had been exactly a year and 4 days, but I mumbled something about "I've been working on quitting forever, it's a continuing battle". Since "forever" has not yet arrived, I thought that was not lying too much. She reset the machine, had me blow harder, it held on zero and flickered on one a few times. Fortunately a talkative person gathered attention, and she went on. The numbers weren't all public, but the lady next to me said she blew a 47.
The potentially best thing of the whole meeting? When it was out, the head of HR chased me down in the hall and asked me very fervently what I thought of it. He and I are on good terms, we don't hang out together outside of work, but he's a cool guy, and we like each other. I was seeing the chance to plant pro-
vaping seeds, so I said it was very good. I told him about triggers, ritual, blah blah, and said that "the county health department says nicotine itself does not cause cancer, and NRT is a good way to stop smoking, without the insanity normally involved".
Since the meetings are deep down sponsored by BP, there will never be any advantage to jumping on the table during the meeting and waving my Darwin around. The better goals of introducing smokers (that want to quit) to it can be done one-on-one, and getting the HR guy to understand vaping are yet to come.
In my experience (I've been able to get almost all my smoking friends and family members to switch. One holdout.) when a smoker tries an e-cig ... he/she can see that quitting is painlessly possible. Print out CASAA info and ... what I did was cut little holes in lots of KR808 condoms so everybody could have a sanitary drag. 
