Our Doctor

BRAVO! You're giving up tobacco

Millions of Americans want to quit smoking. Now they may be able to do it by switching from smoking tobacco to smoking non-tobacco, non-nicotine, non-adddictive BRAVO®!

Dr. Puzant C. Torigian, a scientist educated at the prestigious Columbia University, has spent 40 years developing a business to turn the wholesome lettuce fibers into safer smokes. In fact, he's issued a mission statement that speaks to us all: "The opportunity to choose a healthy way of life is as fundamental a right as liberty and happiness: Bravo Smokes Corporation is committed to the belief that for smokers to elect to quit the tobacco habit is the number one way to improve their health and that of society."

BRAVO, a tobacco free, nicotine free "smoke" is designed to be the answer to the tobacco addiction problem. It looks like a cigarette and smokes like one, with a slightly different taste, with an herb-like flavor. Graphic designer, Pam White, admittedly a smoker who'd love to quit, tried a BRAVO and liked it. "It tasted good!" she admitted. "I felt like I was smoking a regular cigarette." Does she think smoking BRAVO’s could help her kick the habit? "Yes, absolutely." Would she be willing to give BRAVO a try? Again, absolutely yes.

It's people like Pam that BRAVO Smokes is targeting. And by helping to improve the success rate among smokers who want to "quit," the company feels it can positively affect the health of our nation.

Bravo Smokes Corporation is planning a $3.5 million fully integrated plant to process fresh lettuce leaves into the safer, non-addictive BRAVO smokes and be packaged, ready for distribution. Initially, the smokes may be marketed through doctors who will are recommending it to their patients who want to quit smoking.

The company made a press announcement in September at the prestigious Academy of Medicine in Atlanta. Dr. Torigian, a quiet-spoken, smiling but serious scientist, trained at Columbia University, brings some formidable credentials to this latest effort, having developed other new products, including liquid aspirin for babies. He's no kook. And if the idea of smoking lettuce to give up tobacco sounds a little kooky, well, the proof, as they say, is in the smoking!

BRAVO, a non-nicotine smoke, was produced at the plant in College Park, Georgia.

Young Men Have Faced Important Challenges Before

One that was thrust at a young Columbia University graduate in New York over 45 years ago was produced in a 10,000 square foot factory building on Sullivan Drive in College Park, south of the Hartsfield-Atlanta International Airport.

Currently, the facility is being transferred to Wheeling West Va. To a fully integrated production facility thereby reducing costs and increasing capacity.

The initial challenge mentioned above, was basic, tough and enormously important to the public health. It was to create a smoking product that wouldn't hurt or kill people.

The challenger was Joseph Genovese, founder and owner of a large chain of drug stores. Recipient of the gauntlet was his protégé Puzant C. Torigian, a rising young drug company executive and president of the alumni association of the Columbia University College of Pharmacy.

Just the exercise of this challenge showed both men had vision. Those were years, the 1950s, when cigarettes had become an accepted adjunct to everyday life, not seriously perceived as a health threat. As a nation in World War II, we had sent millions of cartons to our soldiers and sailors overseas, and to military hospitals where pharmacist Mate Torigian, who served with the Navy during WWII in the Pacific. In those days, Airline stewardesses put a miniature pack on our tray at mealtime aboard the DC-4. in order to entice people to smoke. Advertising programs would show Physicians --at least the make-believe ones-- appeared in magazine ads touting this brand or that as smoother, milder, "the one doctors recommended." As most people saw it, this was an era when there just wasn't a cough in a carload. Soon cigarettes were referred to as ‘Coffin Nails.’

But Torigian, who was to devote his professional life to pharmaceutical research, manufacturing and marketing, had studied the effects of tobacco, and the toxic chemicals it contains, mainly its addictive agent nicotine, on the human body. This young man's hobby wasn't the movies. It was studying medical journals, which even back then were tracking the harmful effects of tobacco on lungs, heart and brain.

In his twenties and thirties, Torigian tested other materials than tobacco for smoking. He baked them, fried them, tried them raw: carrot and beet tops, cotton, peanuts, maple, rhododendrons, and a hundred other leaves. Most were awful and made him sick. A few, the 81-year old inventor says today, "Weren't bad at all."

Puzant Torigian's career includes a presidency at the ethical pharmaceutical manufacturer M. R. Thompson Company; is the inventor and marketer of liquid aspirin for children; a developer of the pharmaceutical industry in Armenia, his country of heritage, and in Malaysia for the Sterling Drug Company; running the family's Torigian Laboratories in New York. Throughout it all, he continued to pursue what many other people, in financial institutions, the big tobacco companies, even the government agencies, dismissed as an impossible dream.

Twenty-five years ago, armed with several patents on his process for curing lettuce leaves, Torigian almost made it.

In Hereford, an agriculture and livestock center in the Texas Panhandle, he formed the Bravo Smokes Company, with local finance and labor to manufacture what he calls "smokes" made from the outer leaves of field-grown lettuce. The product made headlines and, for a while, registered satisfying sales. It was positioned then (as now) not as a substitute for smoking but as a way to give up smoking altogether.

A combination of factors took Bravo off the market: difficulties with sources of uniform raw materials; an aroma that, while inoffensive, differed from what society had come to accept as namely tobacco smoke, and a hostile takeover fight with a large mail order health food company. But, mainly, the time just wasn't right.

Now, says Torigian, the time is right for a smoke that non-addictive, without tobacco or nicotine and that will help you quit. And many who watch the tide turn against the tobacco industry are quick to agree.

The time is right and the place is suburban Wheeling, WV.

Twenty-five new jobs are being created in the new plant of the Bravo Smokes Corporation, where Torigian is president and CEO.

Old problems with the Bravo product have been licked by advances in natural flavor chemistry and by a new process, whereby, the lettuce is pressed into moist sheets, cured with enzymes and shredded before being manufactured into smokes on high-speed cigarette making machines.

Bravo continues to be the brand name for the principal product. They are filter tipped, king-size and come 20 to a pack, just like cigarettes. They will be carefully and conservatively marketed, at a price slightly higher than tobacco cigarettes. At present, the College Park plant is building to handle requests for Bravo expected after the national announcement at a press conference at the Atlanta Academy of Medicine at mid-September. Torigian has one paramount premise about selling the product. He'll do all he can to ensure that Bravo is sold to individuals who have a serious commitment to give up smoking.

The smokes are available by mail and phone order, with the fulfillment operation at the Atlanta plant. Direct response advertising is expected to boost such sales. Because of the high incidence of smoking among its Hispanic residents, the Miami area was selected for a local introduction before the national announcement. Starting in four eastern and Midwest markets, the product will be advertised and offered at retail through independent drug and health food stores.

In every case, Bravo will be positioned as the easy, convenient and inexpensive way to quit smoking, without patches or gums, most of which contain nicotine. An abundance of medical reports with positive comparisons of lettuce over tobacco smoking in clinical tests will be made available to physicians. Doctors are being encouraged to help pinpoint the success rate lettuce smokes have on quitting smoking by recording the progress of their patients who choose to use Bravo to kick their habit.

Sadly, there were no side bets when Joseph Genovese issued his challenge. But Torigian feels his late mentor would be more than pleased to know he'd had a part in creating what Torigian believes will be a major new company and, perhaps, the only one based in the unlikely link between a smoking product and better health.