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I've been a non-smoker since March 1, 2000. So coming up on four years. I smoked as much as a pack a day at my peak, and had smoked for 10 years, starting when I was 16 years old.
Here's my advice: go TOTALLY cold turkey. He's dragging out the addiction and withdrawal by having 1-3 a day. There are two parts to the addiction, the physical and the emotional/habitual. Breaking the physical addiction is the easy part--just don't smoke. Within a week, the chemicals will have cleared from your body and the physical symptoms (lethargy, coughing, headache, lethargy, general pain, did I mention lethargy) will clear up.
The emotional/habitual part is harder. There are still times when it feels like my whole body is screaming out for a cigarette. He just needs to know that the first week is utter hell, the second week is seriously miserable, and the third week is a major bitch. After that, you've got some momentum built up and you can take anything. And it's definitely better than smoking.
One of the things I learned about myself in the process of smoking is just how automatic I am about things in my life. I was just a total robot when it came to smoking, and I could see that very clearly when I started deliberately breaking that habit. And I started to see how many other places in my life I live on auto-pilot. Breaking this habit really gave me a lot of power in the rest of my life too, because now I can see my automaticity kicking in and can interrupt it and actually choose my behavior.
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