America's most accomplished stop smoking educator, Joel Spitzer devoted nearly 50 years (1971-2020) toward helping smokers quit and youth smoking prevention.

Far from following and teaching the commonly held beliefs of the day, Joel recognized as early as 1976 that nicotine was an addiction. Then, nearly the entire medical and scientific community, including the U.S. Surgeon General (see paragraph 5), contended that smoking was simply a habit.

Joel's early insights allowed him to develop and present nicotine dependency intervention strategies that were years ahead of their time. As a result, participants in Joel's clinics experienced success at rates significantly higher than the national average for such programs.

What started as an eight-grader's 1970 school project on the dangers of smoking resulted in Joel becoming a volunteer smoking prevention speaker for the American Cancer Society (ACS) in 1971. In 1976 he was hired by the ACS as part of its professional staff. This link is to the story of how a 14 year-old never-smoker named Joel started reaching out to much older smokers.

Joel left the ACS in 1978 to become the smoking programs coordinator for the Good Health Program of Skokie Valley Community Hospital, which later became the Rush North Shore Medical Center in Skokie, Illinois (1978 to 2000). Joel remained a volunteer speaker for the ACS during his 22 years with the hospital.

Joel became a consultant to the Evanston Department of Health and Human Services (2000 to 2008) and to the Skokie Illinois Health Department (2000 to 2007). There, he provided state-funded smoking cessation clinics and seminars for the two Chicago suburban communities.

Joel served as education director (2000-2010) and then as a consultant (2011-2020) to WhyQuit.com. He also served as a manager of Freedom, an MSN and then Yuku based quit smoking support group (2000-2006). It was during these 20 years that worldwide sharing of Joel's insights and lessons exploded.

All of Joel's online work was pro bono. He never received any income, fees, or donations, either direct or otherwise (see WhyQuit's Financial Disclosure). Also, one hundred present of his materials were free.

In all, Joel conducted 690 single-session seminars and 350 six-session, 13-day stop smoking clinics between 1972 and 2008.

The Babe Ruth of quitting, Joel is a contender for the most live programs ever, the most days presenting live programs, and the number of years devoted full-time to daily working with smokers and quitters. While more than 100,000 attended Joel's live programs, tens of millions of lives were touched by his online work.

A speaker on smoking and health at more than 30 conferences, Joel also conducted countless newspaper, magazine, radio, and television interviews.

Joel wrote roughly 100 articles that were intended as follow-up reinforcement lessons for his stop smoking clinic participants. Since 2000, those articles and Joel's growing body of work have been available for free within "Joel's Library" at WhyQuit.

A tiny sampling of a few of Joel's more popular articles includes:

• Minimizing the most common side effects to quitting smoking
• Quit smoking tip sheet
• "My Cigarette," "My Friend"
• Quit smoking cold turkey
• Can people quit smoking and still drink alcohol?

Entitled "Never Take Another Puff" (NTAP), Joel's reinforcement articles were compiled into a free PDF e-book in 2003. The 3rd edition of NTAP (2MB) includes 129 short articles and was released in Nov. 2021. At the end of each article is a link to the original article and any related video. NTAP has experienced millions of downloads over the past two decades.

In October of 2006, a new recovery tool was added to Joel's Library, Joel's stop smoking video collection. Joel's video collection gradually grew to nearly 500 video lessons. In 2017, the collection was page formatted and indexed, allowing for easy sharing of related content and links.

A few of Joel's more popular videos include:

• How to quit smoking
• "I want one"
• Blood sugar issues when quitting smoking
• Why I recommend cranberry juice when first quitting smoking
• Dreams of smoking

While Joel retired from service on December 26, 2020, his five decades of insights are today more valuable than ever.

WhyQuit and Joel's students continue sharing his core lessons with quitters around the globe, including having translated portions of his work into 11 different languages.

Million of words during a half-century of service, Joel's most shared lesson is easily stated in a few words. It's impossible to relapse so long as all nicotine remains on the outside, so long as we remain loyal to our original commitment to Never Take Another Puff!