Who is Joel?

Joel has been providing smoking cessation and prevention services since 1972. Having started as a volunteer speaker and then a professional staff member of the American Cancer Society, he became smoking programs coordinator for the Rush North Shore Medical Center in Skokie, Illinois, where he conducted cessation and prevention programs from 1978 until 2000.

Today Joel provides smoking cessation and prevention services for the Evanston and Skokie Health Departments. He also serves as education director at Freedom from Tobacco. Freedom is a 3,500 member free online nicotine dependency recovery classroom and peer support forum linked to WhyQuit.com, the Internet's leading cold turkey quitting resource.

Over the past 35 years Joel has presented more than 350 six-session stop smoking clinics spanning 13 days, more than 690 single session seminars, and has spoken at more than 30 conferences on smoking and health. He has been heard on numerous talk radio broadcasts, appeared on CNBC and Fox News, and has been quoted in news articles across the nation.

But Joel's greatest influence has been online, where since 2000 his collection of 100 free quitting articles (known as Joel's Library - WhyQuit.com/joel ) have been shared at support groups and message boards across the Internet. Entitled "Never Take Another Puff", the articles are also available in PDF book format (1.2MB). More than 859,000 copies of "Never Take Another Puff" have been downloaded since August, 2005.

In October of 2006, Joel added a new feature to the www.whyquit.com site, a free video library, with over 60 videos with over 10 hours of lessons, covering materials he taught in his six session clinics. Since first introduced, over 240,000 of these videos have been viewed over the Internet.

After dealing with thousands and thousands of smokers one-on-one, there may still be a few quitting questions that Joel has yet to field but probably not many!

An 19 or 20 year-old Joel lecturing a group of about one-hundred 8th graders who were about to start Senn High School. His objective was to provide them with ammo to avoid smoking peer pressures.

Read what the Senn Prep Center program director had to say about Joel in 1978.

Joel doing his now famous Palmolive bottle demonstration.

How Joel got involved in the field of smoking prevention and cessation

Page last revised 05/11/07 by JS