Bravo, Lettuce, and Lungfuls of Hope: The Curious Tale of Puzant Torigian’s Herbal Cigarette Crusade
- dthholland
- Jun 4
- 5 min read
In 1997, amidst a storm of lawsuits, congressional hearings, and public outrage against the tobacco industry, an odd little product slipped quietly onto the market. It was called Bravo, and while it looked like a cigarette, smoked like a cigarette, and was sold in boxes just like any other, it wasn’t a cigarette at all.
Bravo’s creator was Puzant Torigian, a pharmacist-turned-inventor based in Hackensack, New Jersey. His product contained no tobacco, no nicotine, and no tar. It was made entirely of lettuce. Dried, cured, shredded, and flavoured with herbal extracts, the humble lettuce leaf became the heart of a decades-long personal mission to help smokers quit, not through patches, gums, or medication, but by mimicking the tactile ritual of lighting up.
Torigian didn’t stumble upon this idea at the height of the anti-tobacco movement; he’d been refining it since 1959. In fact, his first attempt to manufacture Bravo cigarettes came in the 1960s, when smoking was still fashionable and widely considered safe. His was not a reaction to cultural trends, but a lifelong effort to create a gentler alternative to the real thing.
A Pharmacist’s Mission
Born in Constantinople in 1922, Torigian emigrated to the United States with his family in 1929 and trained in pharmacology after serving in the Navy during the Second World War. Inspired, he later claimed, by a challenge from a local drugstore manager to come up with a safer cigarette, he began researching alternatives to tobacco in earnest.
His idea was simple: replicate the experience of smoking while eliminating the addictive and carcinogenic elements. The packaging of Bravo explained the concept succinctly. When cravings hit, smokers were encouraged to reach for a Bravo instead of a Marlboro. The taste was “pretty close,” the website claimed, but the benefit was in the ritual, opening the pack, lighting the match, and inhaling the familiar plume, without the toxicity.
What began as an eccentric project evolved into an obsession. Torigian tested over 200 plants, rhubarb, sunflower, tomato tops, grape leaves, maple, even peanut plants, before settling on lettuce. “Most were awful and made him feel sick,” according to Bravo’s later promotional material. But lettuce, he found, came closest to replicating the sensation of tobacco without producing harmful byproducts. He filed his first patent in 1960, detailing a method to turn leafy greens into smokeable sticks. By 1965, he was producing 90,000 packs a month from a factory in Hereford, Texas.
Torigian even testified before the Senate Commerce Committee in 1967, declaring that he’d solved the global smoking problem. He urged legislators not to be misled by tobacco companies’ promises about filters and called for an “all-out attack” on nicotine. It was a bold move. But his optimism couldn’t match the brutal realities of production costs, taste complaints, and competition. By 1972, Bravo was bankrupt.
Tastes Like… Lettuce?
Even for smokers desperate to quit, Bravo proved a tough sell. Reviews were scathing. Critics likened the experience to “coffee grounds in a newspaper wrapper” or “smoking old socks.” The harsh taste and acrid smell made it difficult to use as intended.
Still, Torigian remained undeterred. He kept refining his formula, exploring new drying techniques, and experimenting with flavour profiles. His second attempt came in the late 1990s, during a cultural moment more sympathetic to the idea of smoking cessation. With a factory near Atlanta’s international airport, Bravo found modest success. The product was sold in health stores and pharmacies across the US and advertised as a smoking cessation aid. Its website promised it would help users quit “safely, naturally and gradually at your own pace.”
This time, Torigian came prepared with endorsements from sympathetic doctors and small-scale studies suggesting Bravo was safer than traditional cigarettes and useful for withdrawal management. One of the ads even read: “Accept the different taste. Enjoy a more pleasant aroma.” In truth, it was still lettuce, and still not especially pleasant. But for a niche audience, Bravo provided a placebo-like crutch—a bridge between addiction and abstinence.
Herbal Cigarettes: A Century of Curiosity
Torigian wasn’t the first to try this. Herbal substitutes have a long, if obscure, history. In the 19th century, American inventors filed patents for faux-tobaccos made from corn stalks, sunflower leaves, and even rhubarb. These were often positioned not as cessation tools, but as remedies for respiratory ailments. Some gained mild popularity, particularly for their soothing menthol properties, and played an indirect role in the eventual development of mentholated tobacco cigarettes.
The post-war era brought renewed urgency. In the early 1950s, as studies began to link smoking with lung cancer, independent researchers and industry insiders alike raced to develop “safer cigarettes.” Big Tobacco, of course, wasn’t genuinely interested in cessation; it sought products that could placate public concern without cutting into profits. Their simultaneous campaign to undermine public health research is now infamous.
But a few independent inventors, people like Jean U. Koree, who experimented with turning wood pulp into cigarette filler, pursued these ideas with genuine public health motives. Torigian was among them. Unlike the industry giants, he viewed the smoking crisis as one rooted in both addiction and ritual. For him, it wasn’t enough to remove nicotine—you had to preserve the routine, the theatre of smoking, to offer real support for people trying to quit.
A Legacy of Lettuce
Despite its commercial failings, Bravo clearly meant a great deal to Torigian. He retired in the 1980s, but never stopped filing patents and tinkering with drying racks and enzymatic processes. He explored launching Bravo 2.0, even experimenting with online nutritional counselling and other wellness-focused business models in his later years.
His widow Joanne, who named the brand in the first place (“Bravo, Puzant, bravo!”), remained a supporter long after the product’s demise. “It would be wonderful if someone wanted to try this again,” she said in an interview following his death in 2021. “If someone wanted to do this to help people give up smoking.”
And someone might. While lettuce cigarettes are largely a historical footnote in the West, the idea of herbal smoking substitutes has gained ground elsewhere. In recent years, inventors in China, Korea, and Thailand have patented tobacco-free cigarettes made from ingredients like tea leaves, lotus, and chicory. A 2024 study found that more than three-quarters of the herbal cigarettes sold on global marketplaces claimed (often dubiously) to help with quitting.
Whether these are effective is another question. Research suggests that most herbal cigs still release harmful tars and heavy metals. Though safer in some respects than tobacco, they are not without risk—and few cessation studies support their use. Nonetheless, the idea persists: that somewhere, perhaps, a non-addictive, natural, and harmless substitute for cigarettes could help the world breathe easier.
One Man, One Mission
Torigian’s life’s work was rooted not in commerce, but in conviction. He and Joanne had both smoked. She quit cold turkey after visiting a hospital and seeing the lung of a long-time smoker. Puzant needed help to quit. Bravo was his answer. It worked for him—and that was enough to keep him chasing the dream for decades.
It’s tempting to dismiss Bravo as a quaint relic of a bygone era, the sort of earnest-but-doomed invention that clogs the bottom drawer of 20th-century public health. But there’s something undeniably noble in Torigian’s persistence. Before nicotine gums, before patches, before vape pens and behavioural therapy programmes, there was one man, some dried lettuce, and a deep belief that the right product, honestly made and well-intentioned, might change a few lives for the better.
For all its flaws, Bravo wasn’t a scam. It was, at heart, one man’s quiet rebellion against an industry that made its billions on addiction. A small act of defiance—and maybe, for some, a breath of fresh air.
Sources:
Kyriakoudes, Louis M., The Albert Gore Research Center
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
Bravo promotional materials (archived)
2024 Herbal Cigarette Market Study – Journal of Global Public Health
