Joel Spitzer

Joel Spitzer (born c. 1957) is an American smoking cessation educator. He currently serves as technical advisor at WhyQuit.com, a free nicotine dependence recovery website.

Early career Spitzer began presenting smoking prevention seminars at the age of 14 in 1971 as a volunteer speaker for the American Cancer Society (ACS).

In 1978, Spitzer became the smoking programs coordinator for the Rush North Shore Medical Center in Skokie, Illinois — the first hospital-based prevention program in the United States. Although the program was a 3-year pilot, he stayed for 22 years. The clinic was funded by the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement Since 1972, Spitzer has conducted more than 350 six-session stop smoking clinics to over 4,500 participants, and 690 one-session seminars to approximately 100,000 people. The book has been downloaded over 2.4 million times.

Although doctors give cold turkey a 10% success rate (and only 5%–10% of quitters are successful on any given attempt),

Spitzer discourages cutting down first, and discourages the use of nicotine replacement therapy (NRT). He believes that no one advocates quitting cold turkey because no money is made from it. "There’s no easy way out of a drug addiction," he said. "It's really hard to quit by cold turkey but it's almost impossible by cutting down. If you have a choice between hard and impossible, go for hard."