One Man’s Lifelong Quest to Create a Lettuce Cigarette

In 1960, he submitted a license for a process to completely dry, remedy, procedure, shred, and roll practically any leafy environment-friendly right into pseudo-tobacco. From the beginning, he had an inkling that lettuce would certainly be particularly near to cigarette in appearance and taste, without creating several damaging byproducts. But he try out over 200 plants to check that suspicion. Tomato, carrot, and peanut tops; cabbage, grape, and watermelon leaves; hickory, maple, and rhododendron. He personally prepared and attempted smoking them all. As Bravo’s site later summed up, “The majority of were awful and made him really feel sick.”

And while a lot of researchers were still playing with ideas, he functioned with a set of investors to open up a manufacturing facility in Hereford, Texas, employ around 200 employees, and begin churning out 90,000 packs a month. There were essentially no cigarette smoking cessation tools on the market, and tobacco insiders appeared to believe there would certainly be real customer demand for the right different smokeable. He presciently called on Congress not to place any kind of confidence in filters, the large security service of the age, bawled out the cigarette sector for unyielding passivity on health and security remedies, and prompted legislators to join him in an “all-out-attack” on nicotine and cigarette.

His determination may have been sustained in part by obsession. It additionally showed a practical belief that there was still a requirement for something like Bravo. In spite of Big Tobacco’s best shots, understanding of the dangers of smoking slowly expanded with time– yet the very first nicotine periodontal to assist people stop smoking only obtained FDA authorization in 1984. Over the next decade, clinical agreement emerged that a mix of nicotine substitute and counseling or treatment were the most effective devices to help people give up smoking cigarettes. Not everyone had accessibility to these resources– and folks like Torigian thought there ought to be a choice to (as he saw it) changing one form of pure nicotine delivery with one more.

“Tobacco has constantly had its critics,” states Louis M. Kyriakoudes, supervisor of the Albert Gore Proving Ground and a specialist in the background of the tobacco sector and nicotine addiction study. Some early European individuals, composing around the turn of the 17th century, grumbled concerning its fragrance, taste, and impacts on their breath. Others griped concerning cost and accessibility. A fair few anxious about its impact on their health and wellness, too. “So, there’ve constantly been individuals trying to find another thing to smoke” that would certainly provide the same experience, claims Kyriakoudes.

Torigian’s advertising and marketing materials asserted that Bravo “tastes (well rather close) like a cigarette,” but lacked their unsafe pure nicotine and tobacco tar. However, in interviews, he stressed that he had not spent 40 years developing the product simply to use a much safer substitute for conventional smokes. He wanted individuals to make use of Bravo as a cigarette smoking cessation tool. “You obtain the emotional and physical fulfillments you’ve related to smoking, like opening up the pack, lighting up, blowing,” Bravo’s old web site described. So when you decide to stop tobacco however face yearnings, “you smoke a Bravo as opposed to a regular cigarette till the time comes when you don’t need either.”

Both study and a small body of Bravo endorsements suggest a sugar pill can supply a little withdrawal alleviation, which can make the difference for some hopeful quitters. Time and research have actually shown that tools like Bravo don’t help a significant number of individuals on their quitting trips, and may in fact distract folks from even more efficient services. Bravo (and most other herbals) were in the end arguably as hazardous as tobacco.

Joanne wasn’t privy to the inner operations of Bravo in its last days, but it appears as if the brand just petered out as the American cessation market went down a different trajectory. You can still acquire natural cigarettes in U.S. today. But they’re mainly marketed as coolor witchy affectations (believe lavender, clove, and mugwort smokes), or as smokey film props.

Numerous tobacco option scientists pointed out “pungent, acrid, and undesirable burning smells” and “unfavorable taste” as significant difficulties to their tasks. The tobacco sector apparently drew support for alternatives research around the mid- ’70s.

Also at the time, this struck many individuals as a weird suggestion. However Bravo wasn’t just one maturing developer’s offbeat concept. It was the most developed of many attempts, extending back over a century, to develop choices to tobacco cigarettes. And Torigian’s persistence in bringing the brand to market, its modest success, and its ultimate obsolescence reflect a rapid advancement from the ’50s onwards in our understanding of the risks of cigarette smoking and the very best means to kick the habit.

In 1997– at the height of a wave of exposés, claims, and public outrage against the tobacco sector– Puzant Torigian, a Hackensack, New Jersey-based business owner, launched a brand-new brand of cigarettes called Bravo. Torigian’s advertising and marketing products asserted that Bravo “tastes (well pretty close) like a cigarette,” but lacked their harmful nicotine and tobacco tar. When you make a decision to quit tobacco but face yearnings, “you smoke a Bravo rather of a common cigarette until the time comes when you do not require either.”

“Cigarette has constantly had its movie critics,” claims Louis M. Kyriakoudes, supervisor of the Albert Gore Research Study Facility and a specialist in the background of the cigarette market and nicotine dependency research study. Kyriakoudes suspects that the handful of private creators that maintained pushing in the direction of tobacco choices did so out of a real idea in harm reduction and wish to help others kick their tobacco habits.

Torigian passed away in late 2021, at 99. However Joanne had a front row seat to his work with Bravo. She even gave the brand name its name. “I come from an Italian background,” she claims. “So when he told me he had an interest in doing this, I said, ‘Oh, Puzant, bravo, bravo!’ And he said, ‘That’s what I’ll call it!'” In his lifetime, Torigian helped introduce a few biomedical start-ups and helped in the advancement of brand-new types of valuable medicines like pediatric analgesics and injectable anticoagulants. Those closest to him say that Bravo, and the underlying idea of discouraging people off smoking cigarettes with a much less hazardous cigarette, became his long-lasting fascination.

In 1997– at the height of a wave of exposés, suits, and public outrage versus the tobacco sector– Puzant Torigian, a Hackensack, New Jersey-based entrepreneur, released a brand-new brand name of cigarettes called Bravo. The manufacturing facility he opened up near the Atlanta International Flight terminal to spin them out at scale drew in sufficient media attention. This protection was much more positive than one could have anticipated.

Still, Torigian remained persuaded throughout that he was onto something large– that his lettuce cigarettes would be his legacy. And passion in the idea of an organic cessation tool does continue a few countries. Over the last decade, innovators in China, Korea, and Thailand have patented tobacco-free cigarettes, made from tea leaves, lotus, chicory, and a lot more, to aid individuals damage free of tobacco. A 2024 research found that over 78 percent of minority dozen organic cigs sold on worldwide on-line markets make (often unsupported) cessation aid cases.

Bravo aided him understand his very own desires. According to Joanne, they were both cigarette smokers up until Torigian started his service Bravo. (He was a menthols guy.) She quit cool turkey after he sent her to a healthcare facility for a graphic look at a chronic cigarette smoker’s lung. However he required something to help with his advises. The Bravo-fueled taper-down strategy he developed got him past the worst of them.

When Torigian relaunched Bravo into the unpredictable however growing smoking cessation market of the late 1990s, he came prepared with a handful of clinical researches that apparently showed lettuce cigarettes were safer than nicotine and could blunt desires. He discovered doctors going to recommend it as a cessation method, and consisted of stopping method literature on his site and wholesale orders. He even created messaging to hedge versus the taste factor. “As you understand it takes a few packs to come to be familiar with any type of brand-new brand name,” one Bravo advertisement reviews. “Accept the different preference. Appreciate an extra enjoyable scent,” reads one more.

Torigian entered this study race in 1959. He saw a “refreshingly straightforward, straight, and effective” method to meet that challenge: switch out tobacco and its pure nicotine.

Torigian wasn’t in fact associated with the dubious tobacco market. Bravo cigarettes contained just lettuce, dried and cured to appear like cigarette, refined into sheets, shredded, seasoned with natural essences, and rolled up and boxed like any type of various other cigarette.

The search for an organic mix that might replace tobacco truly took off in the late 1940s, however– around the same time epidemiological research study began to draw clear lines between cigarette and lung cancer. After a collection of damning studies ignited the public’s interest in between 1953 and 1954, Big Tobacco obtained entailed in choices research study as well, Kyriakoudes discusses, in order to establish ostensibly healthier cigarettes for the health-conscious. Concurrently, they launched their now-notorious campaigns to insist that cigarette cigs were safe and sowed question regarding public wellness study.

When even anti-tobacco crusaders watched smoking as a strangely sticky social behavior instead than a dependency, Torigian also started his job in a period. In spite of installing proof that pure nicotine should be treated like other addicting medicines, wellness authorities hesitated to endorse that view till the late ’80s– partly because they was afraid classifying so many people as addicts in need of therapy. Torigian, like many other scientists, remained convinced that with the best assistance the mind can master any type of physical desire.

Yet it’s most likely the greatest issue was that Bravo’s lettuce faux-tobacco cigarettes just smelled and tasted awful. Individuals who tried them claimed they were even worse than “coffee premises in a paper wrapper,” and similar to “smoking old socks.”

Kyriakoudes suspects that the handful of private inventors who maintained pushing in the direction of cigarette alternatives did so out of an authentic belief in injury reduction and wish to assist others kick their tobacco practices. That’s definitely what drove Torigian to maintain dabbling with his lettuce leaves, even after he lost his life financial savings on Bravo’s initial getaway. After Bravo, he moved to Malaysia to aid establish and handle a medication manufacturing plant, after that took control of and increased his family’s lab. He formally retired in 1984, however trying out startups like a very early on-line dietary therapy service. All the while, in his free time, he was patenting new drying out and curing racks, new chemical processing options, and various other brand-new methods to make a Bravo 2.0 launch much more effective.

But by 1969, Bravo was defaulting on financing payments, and by 1972 the brand name was in bankruptcy. Kyriakoudes suspects that Torigian battled with marketing; he was going head-to-head with a massive industry, after all, and attempting to sell a much safer option to a product lots of people still viewed as largely safe. Torigian himself later claimed that he ‘d simply had problem with logistics and hostile service partners.

Like several very early cigarette choice researchers, Torigian originally prepared to replace one behavior with one more. However according to his widow, Joanne Torigian, he ended up being convinced that smoking any plant was possibly dangerous, as it ‘d always generate some level of harmful tars and particulates. He chose to make and market his tobacco alternative as a cessation tool.

As early as the mid-19th century, American inventors filed licenses for cigarette replacements constructed from economical, frequently aromatic products like “finely cut cornstalks” or “fallen leaves of sunflower and rhubarb.” A few of these very early “herbal cigarettes” actually captured on in the direction of the end of that century, Kyriakoudes includes– yet mostly as medicinal products, smoked in order to “to treat top respiratory system signs like congestion.” The main tradition of those comforting, tobacco-free offerings was the development of easy-on-the-throat mentholated tobacco cigarettes.

For far better or even worse, Torigian’s sympathetic yet doubtful desire of alternative cigarettes might yet be active. “It would be fantastic if somebody desired to attempt this once more,” she claims of Bravo.

Wallace Pickworth, a respected cigarette health and wellness impacts scientist, described over e-mail that he and other researchers whose work Torigian referenced actually made use of Bravo cigarettes as a control in a few researches on the results of pure nicotine. He still finds Bravo remarkable, but claims their unpalatability restricted their usefulness.