Do these changes in cigarette design decrease the amount of tar and nicotine that smokers actually inhale?
These changes in cigarette design do not reliably decrease the amount of tar and nicotine that smokers inhale. The monograph finds that smokers compensate for lower yields of tar and nicotine in a number of easy and effective ways, leading the current testing method to not give meaningful information to smokers on either the amounts of tar and nicotine they will receive from a cigarette, nor the relative amounts of tar and nicotine that they would receive from smoking different brands of cigarettes. In addition to simply increasing the number of cigarettes that they smoke per day, smokers compensate for lower yields of tar and nicotine by: Increasing Puff NumberSmokers can take more puffs per cigarette. A recent laboratory study found that smokers of low-yield cigarettes (cigarettes with less than or equal to 0.8 milligrams of nicotine by FTC measurement) waited a significantly shorter period of time between puffs than did smokers of high-yield brands (cigarettes with between 0.9 milli
