Nearly 50 years of service (1971-2020), Joel Spitzer devoted his life to developing and sharing smoking cessation and prevention insights, programs, and resources.

Far from just following and teaching the commonly held beliefs of the day, Joel was a visionary who recognized in 1976 that nicotine was an addiction, while the Surgeon General and the rest of the medical and scientific community contended it was simply a habit.

Joel's unique insights allowed him to develop and implement nicotine prevention and intervention strategies that were decades ahead of their time. Participants in his clinics experienced success in quitting at rates that far exceeded the national average for such programs.

Joel Spitzer retired from service on December 26, 2020. Prior to retirement he was actively involved in building and maintaining his "Stop Smoking Video Library," a collection of nearly 500 smoking cessation videos. He also served as a pro bono cessation consultant to WhyQuit.com, a smoking prevention and cessation Internet website, and had done so since 2000.

Joel Spitzer started presenting smoking prevention programs in 1971 and cessation programs in 1976, first as a volunteer speaker (1971-1977) and then a member of the professional staff of the American Cancer Society (1977-1978). Although employed elsewhere, he continued service as an American Cancer Society volunteer speaker until 2000.

Joel served as smoking programs coordinator for the Rush North Shore Medical Center's Good Health Program from 1978-2000. During those 22 years, Joel presented the bulk of his prevention and cessation programs, while documenting and sharing key smoking cost, dependency, recovery, and relapse prevention insights as clinic reinforcement letters.

Joel served as a consultant to the Skokie Health Department from 2000-2007 and to the Evanston Department of Health and Human Services from 2000-2008. His primary role was presenting state funded smoking cessation clinics and seminars for the two Chicago suburban communities.

As a pro bono volunteer, Joel served as education director at WhyQuit from 2000-2010 and as a consultant from 2010-2020. Joel's expanding body of work has been shared within "Joel's Library" at WhyQuit since 2000. Many of his original articles have been translated into 11 different languages.

Joel also served as a manager at Freedom, WhyQuit's original support group from 2000-2006. There, he was instrumental in helping formulate the rules governing support group operations, governance that continues at Turkeyville, a 13,000+ member Facebook support site managed by students of Joel's online work.

During his career, Joel conducted more than 350 six-session stop smoking clinics involving more than 4,500 participants (what Joel refers to as "intelligent smokers"), including programs for major corporations, medium and small-sized companies, universities, health departments, and numerous hospitals in the Metropolitan Chicago area.

Besides smoking cessation clinics, Joel has developed and presented smoking education seminars to both adult and school-age groups. Since 1972, he presented more than 690 single-session seminars to approximately 100,000 people.

Joel has been a speaker on the physical, psychological, and social aspects of smoking at more than 30 major conferences on smoking and health throughout Illinois. He conducted numerous training programs for physician and lay speakers and gave many radio, television, newspaper, and magazine interviews.

Joel Spitzer wrote more than 100 articles that were used as part of the follow-up reinforcement for participants of his stop smoking clinics. Most of those articles were compiled into an e-book entitled Never Take Another Puff. Since August of 2005, millions of copies of his free book have been downloaded.

In 2006, Joel began production of self-help videos shared via WhyQuit and YouTube, and as MP3 audio files. Since October 2006, millions of his video and audio files have been accessed from these online resources. All of Joel's online resources; the articles, books, audio and videos available at no charge.

Joel was also involved in other aspects of health promotion, including articles and public speaking on lifestyle and fitness, weight control, drug abuse, cancer prevention, and cancer early diagnosis.

Related video: My work in the field of smoking prevention and cessation