One of the required cigarette warnings for packages and advertisements in the U.S. is "SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Quitting Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks to Your Health." To reduce the health risks of smoking, the best thing to do is to quit; public health authorities do not endorse either smoking fewer cigarettes or switching to lower-yield brands as a satisfactory way of reducing risk. For more information please see the links on the right.

For a discussion of the relative riskiness of lower-yield brands, please follow the external links on the right.

It can be difficult to quit smoking, and many smokers who try to quit do not succeed. Millions of smokers in the United States and around the world have succeeded, though - most without outside assistance. For more information on quitting, please see the links on the right.

For those smokers who want to quit but are having difficulty, there are many programs and products marketed as being helpful, including group classes, hypnosis, nicotine replacement therapies and smoking deterrents. The U.S. Surgeon General has said that "[s]moking cessation researchers have long recognized smoking to be a complex behavior influenced by physiological, psychological, cognitive and social factors. In general, most cessation treatments yield 1-year quit rates (based on all original participants) between 10 and 40 percent." If you want to quit and believe that outside assistance would be helpful, we encourage you to investigate the wide selection of options that are available, and see if there are any that seem right for you.

We're providing for your convenience links to sources of information about quitting smoking in the right-hand column.

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