Of course, PBYS is not the only program or cigarette to use holes to reduce the crud you inhale. At least one cigarette manufacturer uses holes in the paper pouthpiece to reduce the crud you inhale. A picture of the holes manufactured into its mouthpiece appears below. The right picture is the mouthpiece peeled off and flattened, and photographed with back-lighting to show the oblong manufactured holes. Note the two PBYS holes poked into the mouthpiece for comparison.
Other devices are available for poking holes in cigarettes, but they are no more effective than manufacturing holes in each cigarette. They may reduce the amount of crud you inhale, but they do nothing to attack the behavioral portion of your smoking habit, and therefore do not have the same combined effect that PBYS does.
One of the questions most PBYS users ask initially is what "poking" does for them. It is a reasonable question. The first thing you have to understand that a cigarette is like a paper pipe, and poking holes in it causes air to be drawn in which mixes with and reduces the amount of smoke (with the stuff in it) that you inhale. Perhaps the most dramatic way to show you what happens is the following pictures of our Smoking Machine results. Each picture represents four (4) different cigarettes "machine smoked" where the smoke was passed theough a round filter to trap the tar, nicotine, and particulate matter in the smoke stream. The number of Pokes are indicated for each picture:
