Smoking Quit Line (QL) programs utilizing free education and telephone counseling services have been well demonstrated to effectively promote smoking cessation in outpatient primary care settings. Given that active smoking increases pulmonary complications after thoracic surgery, we sought to evaluate the efficacy of the voluntary California Smoker’s Helpline (CSH) QL program in the setting of a thoracic surgery preoperative clinic and tested the hypothesis that patients undergoing surgery would have higher durability of smoking cessation after QL intervention compared historical non-surgical figures.