‘Re-learn life without cigarettes’. That’s the saying of a new bilingual website that plans to help smokers kick the custom for good. At BecomeAnEX.org, smokers can generate free, personalized quit plans while tracking the “triggers” that lead them to light up. And when those cravings start to rise, a live virtual support cluster will be there to assist.

The site is part of a national public health campaign called “EX” launched Monday in Washington, D.C., by a union of prominent organizations to provide a boost to the fight against tobacco addiction. Their aim: to shrink the smoking population—at present about 21 percent of American adults, more than two thirds of whom want to quit—to 12 percent by 2010. Led by the American Legacy Foundation, more than a dozen states and various public health associations have banded together under the banner of the National Alliance for Tobacco Cessation.

If not curbed, smoking could kill more than a billion people this century, according to the World Health Organization. That’s the same number of people who would die if a Titanic sank every 24 minutes for the next 100 years, former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop said at the press meeting.

Expect to see ads for the movement in coming weeks. Unlike the dry antismoking ads of old, these take a funny but understanding look at the struggles people face control their daily routines to life without cigarettes.

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