Project XA: The “Safer” Cigarette That Never Reached the Market

What if a cigarette company discovered a way to make cigarette smoke substantially less carcinogenic — and then decided not to sell the product?

That sounds like the set-up for a conspiracy theory, but it’s the basic story behind Project XA, a decades-long research effort by Liggett & Myers to develop a cigarette that produced lower levels of certain cancer-causing chemicals.

The resulting XA cigarette used a palladium-based catalyst to alter what happened as tobacco burned. Laboratory testing produced striking results, patents were obtained, commercial prototypes were developed and Liggett seriously considered taking the product to market.

It never happened.

The reasons why are more complicated than the story is sometimes made to sound. Liggett had legitimate scientific and marketing problems to solve, but surviving documents and testimony also reveal extraordinary concern about what launching a “safer” cigarette would mean for tobacco litigation — both for Liggett and for the rest of the cigarette industry.^[2][4]

Project XA Actually Began with Research in the 1950s

Project XA is generally associated with the 1970s, but its roots stretch back much further.

In the early 1950s, researchers began publishing experiments in which condensate collected from cigarette smoke was applied repeatedly to the skin of mice. Tumours developed in some of the animals, adding to growing evidence that cigarette smoke contained carcinogenic substances.^[2]

The tobacco industry publicly challenged the relevance of those experiments. A mouse’s painted skin was obviously not the same thing as a human lung, and cigarette manufacturers argued that the experiments couldn’t establish that smoking caused cancer in people.

Liggett took a somewhat different approach behind closed doors.

According to documents and testimony later examined in tobacco litigation, the company hired scientists from the consultancy Arthur D. Little to repeat the experiments. The results supported the earlier findings, and a 1954 Liggett memo described the objective that followed: if cigarettes really did cause cancer, the company wanted to investigate whether cigarettes themselves could be changed.^[5]

That decision eventually led to what became Project XA.

The Search for a Less Carcinogenic Cigarette

This wasn’t a weekend project involving a few scientists tinkering with filters.

Liggett reportedly spent more than $15 million over the course of the research and tested more than 200 different additives in an effort to reduce the carcinogenic activity of cigarette smoke.^[5]

Eventually, researchers focused on palladium.

Why Palladium?

Palladium is a rare metal with useful catalytic properties. A catalyst changes or accelerates a chemical reaction without simply acting as another ordinary ingredient in that reaction. Palladium is perhaps best known today for its use in automotive catalytic converters.

Liggett researchers found that treating tobacco with a solution containing a palladium salt and magnesium nitrate altered the chemistry of combustion and reduced concentrations of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, usually shortened to PAHs.^[4]

PAHs are a family of chemicals produced when organic material burns incompletely. Several PAHs found in tobacco smoke are carcinogenic.

By 1972, Liggett researchers had determined that smoke from the experimental cigarettes contained lower PAH concentrations.^[4]

The Catalyst Was Added to the Tobacco

The XA cigarette wasn’t simply an ordinary cigarette with a special filter attached to the end.

The tobacco itself was treated with a solution containing palladium and magnesium nitrate. The intention was to change the chemical reactions taking place as the cigarette burned, reducing the formation of certain unwanted combustion products before the smoke ever reached the filter.^[4]

That distinction made Project XA particularly interesting. Rather than merely attempting to trap toxic chemicals after they had formed, Liggett was attempting to prevent some of them from being created in the first place.

What Did Tests of the XA Cigarette Show?

This is the part of the story that has helped give Project XA its almost legendary status.

By 1976, Liggett and Arthur D. Little had tested smoke condensate from XA cigarettes using the same mouse skin-painting model that had helped spark cigarette-cancer concerns in the 1950s.

According to testimony submitted by the US Department of Justice many years later, the XA smoke condensate showed a 78–100 percent reduction in carcinogenic activity in that particular experimental model.^[4]

Other summaries of the underlying evidence describe an approximately 85–88 percent reduction in overall tumours and a 77–100 percent reduction in malignant tumours, depending on the experiment and endpoint being measured.

PBS’s NOVA history of the project similarly notes that cancerous tumours were virtually eliminated in some of the skin-painting tests.^[2]

Project XA Had Problems of Its Own

The palladium technology didn’t simply remove every undesirable chemical from cigarette smoke.

One particular problem involved the magnesium nitrate used alongside the palladium catalyst.

Liggett researchers were concerned that adding nitrate could increase the formation of nitrosamines, another important group of carcinogens found in tobacco smoke. Their proposed solution was to add a carbon-based filter capable of reducing that problem.^[4]

This is an important detail because it illustrates just how difficult the idea of a genuinely “safe combustible cigarette” was.

Change one aspect of combustion chemistry and another potentially harmful compound could increase. Tobacco smoke contains thousands of chemicals, so reducing one class of toxicants doesn’t necessarily produce a proportionate reduction in overall health risk.

The XA Cigarette Was Much Closer to Market Than You Might Think

Project XA wasn’t abandoned at the stage of a laboratory curiosity.

Liggett obtained patents for the palladium technology beginning in 1977. By the end of the decade, the company had developed actual cigarette prototypes in both 85 mm and 100 mm sizes, with menthol and non-menthol versions.^[4]

The proposed commercial product is also referred to in litigation records as the Epic cigarette.^[7]

Liggett’s preparations became serious enough that the company purchased substantial quantities of palladium. One remarkable account from former patent lawyer J. Bowen Ross Jr. describes 55-gallon drums of the material temporarily being stored in his basement when a shipment arrived at Liggett’s Durham plant during a strike.^[5]

A January 1979 presentation prepared for Liggett’s board envisioned a major launch and projected that the XA cigarette could capture approximately 1.6 percent of the US cigarette market within its first year.^[4]

For a company whose market position had declined sharply, this wasn’t merely a scientific exercise. XA was potentially a way to revive Liggett’s business.

So Why Was Project XA Cancelled?

This is where the story becomes both fascinating and contentious.

There wasn’t just one problem. XA faced scientific uncertainty, consumer-acceptance issues, regulatory difficulties and potentially enormous legal consequences.

Problem 1: How Do You Advertise a “Safer” Cigarette?

Liggett’s first obvious problem was marketing.

Even if the company believed XA produced less carcinogenic smoke in its laboratory tests, how could it communicate that advantage to consumers?

A health claim could attract scrutiny from the US Federal Trade Commission. More importantly, the evidence from mouse skin-painting experiments didn’t establish that people smoking XA cigarettes would actually experience a particular reduction in cancer risk.^[2][5]

A product whose chief advantage couldn’t easily be stated on the packet or in an advertisement was obviously going to be difficult to sell.

Problem 2: The Research Created an Extraordinary Legal Contradiction

The bigger problem was that the very evidence Liggett needed to promote XA threatened to undermine its defence in cigarette lawsuits.

For years, tobacco companies had challenged the relevance of mouse skin-painting experiments when plaintiffs used those studies as evidence that cigarette smoke caused cancer.

Now Liggett had a product whose main claim to superiority rested on essentially the same test.

PBS summarises the dilemma neatly: Liggett could hardly dismiss mouse experiments as irrelevant in court while simultaneously pointing to mouse experiments as evidence that its new cigarette was safer.^[2]

Internal legal concerns were explicit.

Documents later reported by the Los Angeles Times show Liggett lawyers warning that launching XA could expose the company to enormous liability because it could amount to an admission that its conventional cigarettes were unsafe.^[5]

Problem 3: What Would XA Say About Every Other Cigarette?

The implications stretched beyond Liggett.

If one manufacturer suddenly announced that it had developed a cigarette with dramatically reduced carcinogenic activity, smokers and lawyers might reasonably ask an uncomfortable question:

What did that say about all of the ordinary cigarettes that the industry had been selling for decades?

According to later testimony and internal records, other tobacco companies regarded the XA project with alarm.

Former Liggett lawyer Lawrence Meyer testified that industry lawyers feared an XA launch could undermine the tobacco companies’ common legal position. A later US government expert who reviewed thousands of pages of XA-related records concluded that Liggett had probably been intimidated by at least one other manufacturer into abandoning the project.^[4]

Global State of Tobacco Harm Reduction also describes industry pressure as an important factor, noting fears that a reduced-risk cigarette would imply that conventional cigarettes were unsafe and potentially expose manufacturers to a wave of litigation.^[3]

Did Other Tobacco Companies Threaten Liggett?

There is evidence supporting that allegation, but it deserves careful wording.

James Mold, one of the scientists most closely associated with Project XA, later said that Liggett president K.V. Dey Jr. had told him that a Philip Morris executive threatened unspecified retaliation if Liggett launched the cigarette.

Dey denied that such a threat had been made.^[5]

Other testimony described strong opposition from lawyers associated with Brown & Williamson and the wider industry, including the possibility that Liggett could be excluded from joint industry legal-defence arrangements.^[4]

So it would be too simplistic to say that we have a single smoking-gun document proving that one company ordered Liggett to kill XA. What the historical record does show is sustained concern within Liggett and elsewhere in the tobacco industry that marketing a reduced-risk cigarette could cause serious legal problems for everyone.

The Cancelled Buenos Aires Announcement

One of the strangest episodes came in October 1978.

James Mold and Arthur D. Little scientist Charles Kensler travelled to Buenos Aires for the 12th International Cancer Congress. They planned to present the scientific work and hoped that press coverage would create public interest in the new cigarette.

According to Mold’s later account, Liggett’s general counsel Joseph Greer called shortly before the planned press conference and ordered the team not to distribute its press release or hold the conference.^[5]

Later testimony suggested that one concern was simple: once the findings were publicised internationally, it would become much harder for Liggett quietly to abandon Project XA.^[5]

XA Also Had a Taste Problem

Legal pressure wasn’t the only issue.

Evidence examined during later federal tobacco litigation also indicates that some XA prototypes had poor consumer acceptability. One account described a metallic or gunpowder-like taste.^[8]

That matters because history is rarely quite as tidy as the popular version of the Project XA story.

It’s tempting to imagine a perfect safer cigarette sitting ready on Liggett’s loading dock until tobacco executives ordered it destroyed. The reality was messier. XA had scientifically interesting technology and remarkable animal-test results, but it also had unresolved questions about taste, marketing, regulation, health claims and the extent to which reducing PAHs would translate into meaningful reductions in human disease.

Legal and industry pressure existed alongside those problems rather than replacing them.

Liggett Tried to Take Project XA Overseas

Liggett didn’t immediately give up.

After deciding against a US launch, company representatives explored licensing the technology to cigarette manufacturers overseas.

Presentations were made to companies in countries including France, Austria, Germany and Russia, but no agreement resulted.^[5]

The sales pitch had an obvious weakness. As Mold later recalled, potential partners naturally wondered why they should manufacture a product that Liggett itself wasn’t willing to sell.

By the mid-1980s, Project XA was effectively dormant.^[4]

Project XA Became Public During Tobacco Litigation

For years, relatively few people outside Liggett knew the XA story.

That changed during the landmark Cipollone v. Liggett litigation.

Rose Cipollone had begun smoking as a teenager and later developed lung cancer. Her family’s lawsuit against Liggett and other cigarette manufacturers became one of the most important early tobacco cases in the United States.

Depositions and documents produced during the case brought previously confidential tobacco-industry research into public view, including evidence relating to the palladium cigarette and Project XA.^[1]

The revelation created an awkward new question for cigarette manufacturers: if a company had possessed technology that it believed might reduce some of smoking’s hazards, what responsibility did it have to use it?

The XA Technology Eventually Returned as Omni

Project XA didn’t disappear completely.

Years later, researchers working for Vector Tobacco — Liggett’s corporate successor — revisited the old palladium technology.

In 2001, Vector launched a cigarette called Omni using technology derived from the XA palladium catalyst along with a carbon filter.^[4]

Omni was marketed around reduced levels of certain carcinogenic chemicals rather than as a safe cigarette.

It was not a commercial success. That failure provided another lesson from decades of attempts to engineer a less hazardous combustible cigarette: even when manufacturers could reduce particular toxicants, explaining the significance to smokers — without promising safety that hadn’t been demonstrated — remained extremely difficult.

Was Project XA Really a Safe Cigarette?

No. Calling XA “the safe cigarette” makes for a great headline, but it goes beyond what the evidence actually established.

The XA cigarette still burned tobacco. Combustion creates a complicated mixture of toxic chemicals, and reducing a particular group of carcinogens doesn’t eliminate all of the other hazards associated with smoke.

The experiments showed that XA dramatically reduced tumour formation in certain laboratory tests. They did not show that humans could smoke XA cigarettes for decades without developing lung cancer, cardiovascular disease, COPD or other smoking-related illnesses.

This distinction is also why modern approaches to tobacco harm reduction tend to focus on avoiding combustion altogether rather than attempting to perfect the burning cigarette.

Vapes work differently because they heat e-liquid rather than burning tobacco. The NHS states that vaping exposes users to fewer toxins and at lower levels than smoking, although vaping is not risk-free and is intended for adult smokers rather than people who have never smoked.^[9]

For adult smokers who choose vaping as an alternative, today’s vape kits are therefore based on a fundamentally different idea from XA: rather than trying to clean up tobacco smoke after combustion has begun, they avoid tobacco combustion in the first place.

Why Project XA Still Matters

Project XA is fascinating partly because it provides a glimpse into what tobacco companies knew internally during an era when their public statements about smoking and disease were much more guarded.

Liggett’s scientists weren’t merely debating whether cigarette smoke contained carcinogens. They spent years and millions of dollars trying to remove some of them.

It also demonstrates the almost impossible position created by the search for a “safer cigarette.”

To explain why the new product was better, a manufacturer first had to explain why the old product was dangerous.

That created scientific, regulatory and especially legal problems at a time when cigarette companies were simultaneously defending themselves against lawsuits alleging that smoking caused cancer.

Project XA therefore sits at an unusual point in tobacco history: a technically serious attempt to reduce the toxicity of a combustible cigarette that became entangled with the industry’s much larger problem of acknowledging what made cigarettes dangerous in the first place.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was Project XA?

Project XA was a research programme by Liggett & Myers to develop a cigarette that produced lower levels of certain cancer-causing substances. The resulting experimental cigarette used palladium and magnesium nitrate to alter combustion chemistry and reduce polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in the smoke.

What was the XA cigarette?

The XA cigarette was Liggett’s experimental palladium-treated cigarette developed through Project XA. It reached the prototype and patent stage and was seriously considered for commercial launch during the late 1970s, but Liggett never sold it.

What does XA stand for?

Surviving histories and litigation records generally refer to XA simply as the project’s internal designation rather than expanding the initials into a specific phrase. The technology was also described as the palladium catalyst cigarette, and some records identify Epic as a proposed commercial brand name.

How did the Project XA cigarette work?

The tobacco was treated with a solution containing a palladium compound and magnesium nitrate. The palladium acted as a catalyst and altered chemical reactions during combustion, reducing the concentration of some polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in cigarette smoke.

Did Project XA eliminate cancer?

No. Some laboratory mouse experiments showed extremely large reductions in tumour formation when smoke condensate from XA cigarettes was applied to the skin, but those tests didn’t prove that XA would prevent cancer in human smokers.

Was the XA cigarette safe?

No cigarette involving tobacco combustion can accurately be described as proven safe. XA appeared to reduce some carcinogenic constituents and performed much better in certain animal tests, but it still produced smoke and didn’t eliminate the many other risks associated with smoking.

Why wasn’t the XA cigarette released?

Several factors were involved. Liggett faced difficulty making legally defensible health claims, some prototypes reportedly had poor taste, and the scientific tests couldn’t establish a specific reduction in human disease. There is also substantial documentary and testimonial evidence that Liggett and other cigarette companies feared that releasing a “safer” cigarette would undermine their legal defence of conventional cigarettes.

Did other tobacco companies stop Project XA?

Former Liggett personnel testified that the company faced pressure from other cigarette manufacturers and industry lawyers. There were also allegations of threats, although some of those claims were disputed. Later examinations of the documentary record concluded that industry pressure probably contributed significantly to Liggett’s decision, but it wasn’t the project’s only problem.

How much did Liggett spend on Project XA?

Historical reporting based on internal records indicates that Liggett spent more than $15 million and investigated more than 200 additives during the wider research programme that eventually produced the XA cigarette.

What happened to the Project XA technology?

The technology remained dormant for years before being revisited by researchers associated with Vector Tobacco. In 2001, Vector introduced Omni, a cigarette that used technology derived from Project XA’s palladium catalyst along with a carbon filter.