As to my motivations for doing this type of work, well that is a little harder to describe

In many ways, I don't fully understand what originally sparked the interest in me and became what has now turned into a campaign of over 30 years. I first started conducting smoking prevention seminars in 1971 as a freshman in high school. I was quite a sight back then. Fourteen years old, but coming off quite a bit younger since I wasn't five feet tall and my voice hadn't changed yet and I was a volunteer lecturer for the American Cancer Society. Originally I was lecturing to high school and elementary school groups, but by the beginning of my junior year in high school, I was being asked to lecture in colleges and universities. While I am known by the online world now mostly for my writing, I was never really a natural writer. Public speaking was much easier and more natural to me.

Presenting the Palmolive Bottle Demonstration in the Chicago Civic Center in 1975.

Presenting a seminar on the dangers of smoking to a Chicago Public High School Group in 1976.

By the time I was a senior in high school, I was lecturing in medical schools and at professional medical conferences throughout Illinois. I was also the main speaker at a number of conferences on smoking and health Illinois. At many of these conferences there would usually be a panel of physicians speaking on the laws about smoking, the economics of smoking, the advertising of smoking and the social implications of smoking and then I would be the speaker to deliver the dangers and the medical consequences of smoking. I became quite a popular speaker in the area. I really enjoyed this work and I realized that I was reaching people with a potentially life saving message that just didn't seem to be told often enough or understood well enough by the general public.  

The programs I conducted the first few years were always about the dangers of smoking. My audiences were either school age kids who I was trying to reach with the message of prevention, or programs for college students or professionals in the public health field in teaching them about the dangers of smoking and hopefully inspiring them to help to tackle the problem in their professional capacities.

In 1976  I was lecturing at a Chicago based medical school and one of the professors of the school had just been asked to send a speaker to a stop smoking clinic being held at a drug abuse center on the north side of Chicago. After seeing my presentation the professor asked if I could fill the request and be the speaker. I agreed to the request. All I was being asked to do was the opening session of the clinic, to teach the smokers wanting to quit what smoking was going to do to them if they didn't quit. Another person was going to come teach them how to quit in the next four sessions of the clinic scheduled to be held later that week.  I am going to attach a letter here that explains the next phase of my indoctrination into the stop smoking world. It also answers the question to my own personal smoking history.

"You never smoked--how could you understand what I am going through?"  

Not a clinic goes by where I don't hear this complaint from at least one participant.  If I get asked about my personal smoking history on the first day of the program, the entire group often questions my ability to help them.  While it may surprise many smokers, my understanding of the overall quitting process is more comprehensive primarily because I never did smoke.  

There are numerous programs taught in smoking cessation, mostly by ex-smokers.  The instructor often is working under the assumption that he was a "typical" smoker and what worked for him will work the same for everybody.  If, when he stopped, he had little or no withdrawal, he may figure that the technique he used makes quitting an easy and painless process.  Some participants in his program may have a similar experience--but others may not.  In a typical group, some people will have an easy time, others will find it only moderately difficult, and a few may have real severe physical symptoms.  The teacher often cannot empathize with class participants encountering difficulties.  In his opinion, if they followed his approach, they should be feeling fine.  The people having symptoms often begin to feel that they are abnormal.   In the opposite extreme, I have encountered clinic moderators, who, when they had quit, had terrible withdrawal.  An instructor like this may get a person in his group who is having only minimal difficulty and convince him that severe reactions will soon occur.    If symptoms don't develop in the class member, he may think that he is abnormal.  

When I started conducting clinics, I had no preconceived idea of what quitting smoking was like or how it should be attempted.   Due to a strange set of circumstances, I was asked and very reluctantly agreed to try to help seven people quit smoking.  The first day of the program I showed the medical consequences of smoking, which then was my area of expertise.  The next day I came to the group having absolutely nothing more to add.  So I encouraged the group to talk.  Four of the people had gone cold turkey.  I didn't tell them to; they were just so alarmed by the slide show that they did not want to smoke.  The others had cut down drastically.  All seven were complaining of symptoms.  I figured that you feel some discomfort the first day no matter what you do to quit.  

The next day, one of the people who had gone cold from the first day was feeling substantially better.  Another who had gone cold turkey said that he was now cutting down.   In actuality, he had relapsed, but neither of us recognized the significance at the time.  The other five people still sounded miserable.  In the fourth session, a pattern had become clearly obvious. The three who had been totally abstinent from day one said they were feeling surprisingly good.  Urges were weakening and were less frequent, and physical improvements were becoming noticeable.  Those who had been cutting down were increasing consumption and still suffering horribly. While the immediate effects of quitting were difficult for all, those going cold had the shortest period of suffering, and, more importantly, they were the only ones to successfully quit.

Since that clinic, I have witnessed the experiences of thousands of people attempting to quit.  In every program I have conducted since that time, I have shared the techniques and experiences of people who have succeeded.  I don't feel it is the way to quit only because it is how one person did it; it is the way to quit because it works for the majority of people following the approach.  While the intensity of the withdrawal varies, anyone going cold will feel better in a few days from his or her last cigarette.  More important, once a person quits smoking, withdrawal will be a thing of the past, something he or she will never have to contend with again as long as he or she knows to NEVER TAKE ANOTHER PUFF!

Video discussing experience from my first clinic: High speed access • Dial up access • Audio only

So now I was introduced to working with people who were quitting smoking. This is where I really got motivated and excited by the work. For the first time I started to really get to know the people I was lecturing to and I really liked these people. I knew right off that I was helping them in an important area of their lives. The work affected me in a way that I never felt before from my previous lectures.

In my other school based programs and lectures at conferences I would talk to hundreds or sometimes thousands of people at one time, leave, and never see them again. I never knew for sure that what I was saying was really influencing the individuals in the audiences or really making a difference. The clinic work was different. I called the people from my first group daily and they called and kept in touch with me. I kept contact with these people for many years. I maintained contact with one of these original seven people for 28 years until the time of his death in September of 2004.   Even after running thousands of people through clinics since 1976, the satisfaction I get from this work still feels the same. It's so hard to describe the feeling of purpose that it has given me. I did this work as a non-paid volunteer from 1971 through 1977, almost full time the last couple of years of that period.  

In 1977 I was hired by the American Cancer Society and became the Smoking Program Coordinator for the Chicago Unit. In this capacity I conducted most of the school based smoking programs and the "I Quit Smoking" clinics throughout all of Chicago. I left the American Cancer Society in 1978 when I was hired by the Rush North Shore Medical Center's Good Health Program. The Good Health Program was a pilot program--the first hospital based prevention program in the country. Until this point in time, hospitals were only viewed as a facility where people went when they got sick. The Good Health Program was designed to show that hospitals could do more in trying to prevent people from getting sick.

When I was originally hired the program was only supposed to be a three-year project. I ended up being at the Good Health Program for the next 22 years, providing smoking cessation classes until July of 2000. I loved this work. I got to help a lot of people quit smoking—as many as 10 to 60 people at a time in six-day clinics. I didn't see these people as a group, but rather as10 to 60 individuals that I got to know on a personal and usually a very friendly basis. I liked these smokers, and because I liked them I wanted them to help them become ex-smokers.

As important as the work seemed to me in 1976, it took on a much more important role to me as time went on. After doing clinics for some time another factor made my work in this field seem even more crucial. I began to personally encounter more and more people who were being ravaged by smoking induced diseases. I really began to see the dangers of smoking--not from the view of national statistics, but now from the view of people I knew and cared about. Over the years I have personally known more people who have died from what was most likely smoking induced cancer, heart disease and other conditions than I can count or keep track of. I see my work as a way to prevent others from facing a similar fate. I don't want to be a fanatic in the field, and I have never tried to force my position on others. In the field of smoking cessation I have always just tried to help the people who wanted help to quit.

In 2000 I started sharing my materials on the Internet. I had written almost 100 articles that I used to send to my clinic graduates to help to reinforce concepts they learned in the Stop Smoking Clinic. I donated these letters and gave permission to many different sites to help people looking for information on quitting smoking. Many of the letters were basically sitting in mothballs and the Internet gave them a new life and seems to be a natural outlet for them to continue to help people to quit smoking. Most of the letters are now compiled in a free e-book that can be downloaded at www.whyquit.com/joel/ntap.pdf.

Most of my time now is spent helping people quit through my online work at www.whyquit.com and its Freedom Message board, and running smoking prevention and cessation programs for the Evanston Illinois Department of Health and Human Services. In all of the programs I have run and to all of the people I reach online I am just trying to get out the life saving message that avoid the danger associated with smoking is as simple as never starting to smoke in the first place, and if you do smoke, the way to minimize future risks is to quit smoking and then to stay free by making and sticking to a personal commitment to never take another puff!