Freedom

Founded on September 8, 1999 by John R. Polito and Joanne Diehl, Freedom was WhyQuit's original MSN hosted support group. Exclusively for cold turkey quitters, it quickly evolved into the Internet's most serious, focused and education oriented quitting site. Due to a number of factors, Freedom ceased accepting new members on September 6, 2017.

Aside from the thousands of successful cold turkey quitters it inspired and educated, the most memorable day in Freedom's history was January 20, 2000. It was then that Joel Spitzer joined the forum, bringing with him the educational cornerstone that would transform Freedom and WhyQuit into valuable and effective nicotine dependency recovery tools.

After a decade, on January 18, 2009, with MSN closing, we migrated Freedom to Yuku and renamed it "Freedom from Nicotine." Thousands of threads were lost during migration and all thread links were non-functional. On September 5, 2017, Yuku was sold to Tapatalk, which migrated Freedom for the second time. Again, thousands of threads, links and images were lost or damaged.

We also experienced problems re-admitting members and could no longer keep the forum totally free of advertising by paying modest fees for ad-free thread views. Additionally, under the watchful eyes of Joy Kauffman and Sallie Hamilton, two early Freedomites, our second support group - Turkeyville based on Facebook - was thriving with membership approaching 10,000.

Today, as time allows, we're gradually salvaging and building a collection of WhyQuit pages that mirror and share a tiny fraction of Freedom's most memorable threads and posts. We hope you enjoy them.