Jason Jeong was a Cornell sophomore when, in 2016, he noticed classmates surreptitiously sucking on devices hidden in their sleeves during lectures. Plumes of crème brûlée vapor formed like clouds above their heads, filling campus with a sweet fog. Jeong had only just learned about vaping, but seemingly everyone was doing it, mostly with a stylish device called the Juul.
Jeong had started smoking cigarettes as a freshman, overcoming the initial “ick” factor and working up to a pack every few days. His first hit of a Juul in his sophomore year required no such adjustment. “It tasted incredible,” he remembers, and delivered the same pleasing jolt of nicotine.
In class, Jeong began to smell not of Marlboros, but of mango vapor. Jeong wasn’t the only one seduced by Juul, which combined the addictive pull of nicotine and the design of sleek tech products. 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.
A little LED lit up when you took a hit, and when its battery ran down, it plugged into a laptop’s USB port. By Jeong’s senior year, 2018, Juul Labs, the device’s maker, reached a $10 billion valuation, faster than any company in tech history. By the end of 2018, it was valued at $38 billion, more than Lyft, WeWork, or Airbnb.
Four years later, Juul is poised to become one of tech history’s greatest unravelings. In late June, the US Food and Drug Administration denied Juul’s application to continue marketing its products, and ordered the company to immediately stop selling and distributing in the US. After Juul appealed, the FDA suspended the order pending further review; a federal court has also blocked the FDA’s ban temporarily.
Joe Murillo, chief regulatory officer at Juul, wrote in a statement that he believes the company “will be able to demonstrate that our products do in fact meet the statutory standard of being appropriate for the protection of the public health. ” The FDA says that as of now, the company lacks the necessary authorization. “Juul cannot legally market, ship, or sell their products.
The stay does not change this,” says Cherie R. Duvall-Jones, a press officer for the agency. If the FDA’s decision is upheld, it could mark Juul’s last gasp.
But even if Juul’s products disappear from shelves in a puff of mango smoke, little can erase the indelible mark it has left on society. One recent study , from UC San Diego, estimates that more than 1 million young people became daily e-cigarette users thanks to Juul. Before Juul, electronic cigarettes served a small but growing market of smokers trying to quit, offering a nicotine hit without the cancer risk that has made cigarettes the leading cause of preventable death in the US.
The problem, as Juul cofounder James Monsees told WIRED in 2015 , was that e-cigarettes were a poor substitute. They were expensive, clunky, and didn’t provide the head rush smokers got from cigarettes. And they definitely didn’t look cool.
Monsees and cofounder Adam Bowen tinkered for nearly a decade before they launched the Juul, in 2015, which was meant to solve those problems. The device was encased in a matte shell and delivered vapor automatically when a person inhaled, like a real cigarette. It came in several delicious flavors, initially dubbed “tabaac, fruut, miint, and bruulé.
” Bowen also patented a way to increase the nicotine content, from about 1 percent by volume in earlier e-cigarettes to nearly 5 percent in Juul’s swappable pods—enough to satisfy even heavy smokers. A single pod contained 40 mg of nicotine, as much as an entire pack of cigarettes. 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.
As he collected more, Juul began to look less like an e-cigarette company. Those products targeted existing smokers who wanted to quit, people generally between the ages of 35 and 60. But Juul advertised heavily on Instagram, whose users were significantly younger, and its models looked young.
The company placed ads in magazines with youthful audiences like VICE and Seventeen , and on TV channels such as Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network. To Jackler, Juul’s strategy looked like a tech-y reboot of tactics previously used by Big Tobacco. 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.
Juul, unrestricted by regulators, was repeating the playbook. “These are entry devices,” says Jackler. “Nicotine addiction is very hard to break, and it almost always starts during teenage years.
” By Paris Martineau 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. Companies would now have to apply for authorization to market and distribute their products. Those already on the market got a two-year grace period.
Juul used that time to continue its marketing blitz, showing young influencers looking hip as they blew out rings of vapor. But its success began to draw pressure. The CDC warned in 2016 that e-cigarette ads had reached 70 percent of middle and high schoolers.
“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. In 2011, only about 200,000 middle and high school students had vaped, according to the National Youth Tobacco Survey. By 2018, more than 3.
6 million had. Several public health groups sued the FDA , arguing that it had enabled a national health crisis by failing to regulate companies like Juul. 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.
“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. A federal court sided with the health groups in 2019, compelling the FDA to start enforcing its authorization process for e-cigarettes companies. The FDA gave e-cigarette makers a deadline of 2020 to apply for authorization, or be forced off shelves.
(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. But its future began to look cloudy.
Juul now had to pivot. 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.
Juul now had to adapt to regulatory scrutiny, producing extensive reports about its product’s components, ingredients, and health risks to win FDA authorization. The company started hiring people to handle government relations and manage public affairs. It also crippled its own product lineup, pulling its most popular flavors—such as mango and fruit medley—from the shelves to leave only menthol, mint, and tobacco pods.
The company’s announcement of the news quoted then CEO K. C. Crosthwaite pledging to “reset the vapor category by earning the trust of society and working cooperatively with regulators, policymakers, and stakeholders.
” Many US lawmakers were unimpressed. A spate of mysterious lung injuries linked to other vaping companies further tarnished the new industry’s reputation. In 2019, San Francisco banned all vaping products that had not been reviewed by the FDA—preventing Juul from selling its products in its hometown.
By the end of the year, Congress had approved legislation to raise the national age for e-cigarette sales from 18 to 21. None of that has threatened Juul quite as much as the FDA, which began to take big swings at the vaping market. In 2020 it ordered a halt on sales of all vaping products with sweet and fruity flavors, as Juul had appeared to anticipate, and in 2021 it denied marketing approval to more than 55,000 flavored e-cigarette products.
Finally, in June of this year, the FDA came for Juul, denying its own marketing application and ordering its products off the market. While the official reasoning said the company provided inadequate toxicology data, FDA commissioner Robert M. Califf noted in a statement that Juul may have “played a disproportionate role in the rise in youth vaping.
” Even if Juul survives, its moment as a disruptive market leader may have passed. Jeong, the Cornell graduate, says his peers stopped using Juuls when the company discontinued its popular flavors. People liked mint, which remained on the shelves, but no one wanted to puff on a tobacco-flavored Juul.
Rather than dropping their vaping habit, his friends moved on to other brands that emerged to pick up Juul’s declining market share. One of them, Fume, still sells flavors like pineapple, which Jeong describes as “drinking a piña colada,” thanks to a new regulatory loophole. The FDA’s ban applies to flavored vape cartridges, like Juul’s pods, but not disposable e-cigarettes, which come precharged and prefilled.
By 2020 the disposable Puff Bar, with flavors like Banana Ice and Blue Razz, had replaced Juul as the most popular vaping device among teens. That outcome disappoints some public health groups, which say the FDA should have been stricter from the start. “When you don’t act, or you act in a way that creates massive loopholes,” says Myers, of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, “you’re giving a road map to the industry for what to do.
” The FDA said in May it will require disposable e-cigarette brands to apply for marketing approval. Other public health experts worry that the FDA risks being too tough on vaping, potentially hindering adult smokers who use products like Juul to ease themselves off cigarettes. “Many clinicians tell me, ‘I had a patient who couldn’t quit with anything until this came along,’” says Cheryl Healton, the dean of NYU’s School of Global Public Health.
She says the FDA should look at the costs and benefits of leaving vapes on the market, including the possibility that it will prevent deaths caused by cigarette use. For now, Juul’s future hangs in the balance, to be decided between the FDA and the courts. Some former customers like Jeong have long moved on, and are waiting for the next thing, with the next delicious flavor.
“If Juul goes away, it will change absolutely nothing,” says Jeong, who vapes regularly and occasionally smokes cigarettes. His Juul is somewhere in a drawer, “purely as a keepsake. ”.
From: wired
URL: https://www.wired.com/story/juul-nears-its-last-gasp/
