The main goal of programs aimed at smokers has been to help them stop smoking completely. There has been little attention to helping them reduce their use. However, some people are willing to try to reduce the number of cigarettes they smoke while they are unwilling to quit completely.

A team of Cochrane Researchers analyzed the current studies available to see if there were any effective methods that could reduce use.

The team found that between 6% and 9% of people using nicotine replacement products managed to reduce their use of cigarettes, which was certainly better than the control groups where only 1-3% reduced their use. The team also found no evidence that the treatments that aimed to reduce use diverted people from stopping completely.

However, the researchers point out that there is no evidence that reducing the number of cigarettes used has any health benefits, other than leading people to one day quit smoking entirely.

I can read this analysis two ways. One way tells me that reducing the number of cigarettes is not an unreasonable path to completely quitting smoking one day. That's promising. The other way seems to say that reducing the number of cigarettes doesn't improve health anyway, so you might as well smoke more? I'll go with the first. Less cigarettes has to be better than more.