The company, as Jamie Ducharme writes in her 2019 book Big Vape, modeled itself after a typical San Francisco startup, where people would “skateboard back and forth across the office's concrete floors and shoot each other with foam Nerf darts.” Many early employees, like founders Monsees and Bowen, had design and marketing backgrounds. (That deadline was later pushed back, because of Covid.) Juul had already been on sale for four years, and by then made up 75 percent of the e-cigarette market. The FDA gave e-cigarette makers a deadline of 2020 to apply for authorization, or be forced off shelves. “The data seems to argue that the Juul-like products are meant to sustain addiction, not wean someone from addiction,” says Matt Myers, the president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, which was among the groups to sue the FDA.Ī federal court sided with the health groups in 2019, compelling the FDA to start enforcing its authorization process for e-cigarettes companies.
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Most public health experts agreed that e-cigarettes were significantly safer than combustible cigarettes, but the risks of vaping were unknown, and watching millions of school kids become nicotine addicts made many people uneasy. Several public health groups sued the FDA, arguing that it had enabled a national health crisis by failing to regulate companies like Juul. In 2011, only about 200,000 middle and high school students had vaped, according to the National Youth Tobacco Survey. “The same advertising tactics the tobacco industry used years ago to get kids addicted to nicotine are now being used to entice a new generation of young people to use e-cigarettes,” CDC director Tom Frieden said. The CDC warned in 2016 that e-cigarette ads had reached 70 percent of middle and high schoolers. Juul used that time to continue its marketing blitz, showing young influencers looking hip as they blew out rings of vapor. Those already on the market got a two-year grace period. Companies would now have to apply for authorization to market and distribute their products. The first hint that Juul’s regulator-free window was closing came in 2016, when the FDA expanded its definition of “tobacco products” to include e-cigarettes. “Nicotine addiction is very hard to break, and it almost always starts during teenage years.” Juul, unrestricted by regulators, was repeating the playbook. Cigarette companies had advertised in youth magazines, paid for product placement in cartoons, and used youth celebrities until federal law banned them from marketing to younger people. To Jackler, Juul’s strategy looked like a tech-y reboot of tactics previously used by Big Tobacco. The company placed ads in magazines with youthful audiences like VICE and Seventeen, and on TV channels such as Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network. But Juul advertised heavily on Instagram, whose users were significantly younger, and its models looked young. Those products targeted existing smokers who wanted to quit, people generally between the ages of 35 and 60. As he collected more, Juul began to look less like an e-cigarette company. Robert Jackler, a surgeon at Stanford who created the world’s largest database of tobacco ads, saw his first Juul ad shortly after the product first hit the shelves.
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By the end of 2018, it was valued at $38 billion, more than Lyft, WeWork, or Airbnb. By Jeong’s senior year, 2018, Juul Labs, the device’s maker, reached a $10 billion valuation, faster than any company in tech history. A little LED lit up when you took a hit, and when its battery ran down, it plugged into a laptop’s USB port. His generation was raised on Snapchat and hoverboards, the first kids to grow up using their iPhones like an appendage-Juul’s aesthetic fit right in. Jeong wasn’t the only one seduced by Juul, which combined the addictive pull of nicotine and the design of sleek tech products. In class, Jeong began to smell not of Marlboros, but of mango vapor.
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“It tasted incredible,” he remembers, and delivered the same pleasing jolt of nicotine. His first hit of a Juul in his sophomore year required no such adjustment. Jeong had started smoking cigarettes as a freshman, overcoming the initial “ick” factor and working up to a pack every few days. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.