History

In 1985 the North Karelia Project started to apply a smoking cessation contest, the Quit&Win, as a new method in its overall community-based anti-smoking work. In 1986 the first national Quit&Win campaign was arranged, combined with national stop-smoking television programs that the participants were urged to watch.

In 1994, within the WHO’s CINDI (Countrywide Integrated Noncommunicable Disease Intervention) framework, the first international Quit&Win contest was organized in 13 countries which all applied jointly agreed rules. Since then, the competition has taken place internationally every other year: 1996 with 25 countries, in 1998 with over 200,000 participants involved from 48 countries, in 2000 some 430 000 participants in 69 countries and in the International Quit&Win 2002 already almost 700.000 smokers took part in 76 countries worldwide.