Juul Labs CEO to Step Down
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Edit: I agree examples cited below arguably constitute selling.
That said, if this is what parent was referring to, would likely have been better to say so since this isn't what selling implies when stated without any qualifier.
> In April 2017, a Juul representative visited the Dwight School in New York City to meet with students — with no teachers present — and told them the company’s e-cigarettes were “totally safe.”
> Other schools across the country were offered $10,000 from the e-cigarette company for the right to talk to students in classrooms or after school.
> In Richmond, Calif. last year, Juul gave the Police Activities League $90,000 to offer the company’s vaping education program “Moving Beyond” to middle school and high school students who faced suspension for using cigarettes.
Not defending either of those, but making a distinction in meaning.
Even if it's still a very bad thing.
This claim is pretty strongly refuted by all available evidence, given that (before vaping), tobacco use among teenagers had been in a consistent decline for decades, without a corresponding consistent increase in marijuana or heroin use among teenagers.
As someone who used to work in drug policy during this exact time period and has a very strong grasp of the facts on the matter, I can assure you that your speculation is entirely without merit. Teen tobacco use decreased. It didn't pawn off those would-be tobacco users onto other drugs, as if drugs were some fully fungible entity in teenagers' minds. Teen tobacco use decreased, full-stop.
$10k per room of kids is probably a low cost of customer acquisition for a potential lifetime addiction.
On the one hand, you have what sounds like straight up abusive targeted marketing of a drug at a vulnerable population: direct meeting with children, no teachers present (!?), "totally safe", etc. This seems reprehensible.
On the other hand, if it's an "education program" specifically targeted (and limited) to students who have already demonstrated that they have a cigarette problem, it seems like it could be a genuinely well intended part of a program to provide harm mitigation and a (apparently fairly successful) tool to help quit. I'm a bit more sympathetic to that version, even if it's still financially motivated.
On the gripping hand, vaping has unclear risks of its own that we don't fully understand yet, and even setting aside the improvement going from smoke to vapor, any nicotine product is still going to be an addiction risk.
[0] https://www.publichealthlawcenter.org/topics/commercial-toba...
But these big companies can't compete with all the Vape Shops that are insanely popular and are everywhere.
This is why there is just a big hubbub over regulation and the deaths over black market Marijuana cartridges. These massive corporations can afford to deal with things like FDA certification of flavors and such things.
Were as the small companies, that make up the bulk of the vape market, cannot. So they will get pushed out of the market and 'big tobacco' will be the only ones that are allowed to sell in the USA. They really don't care if they have bad names and are used as targets by the regulators when they are going to be the only ones allowed to sell to the public.
Governments are going along with this because tobacco is a massive tax base. They can't regulate small business and internet sales in the same manner they can regulate and tax a small number of massive corporations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
According to 'Lung Cancer Fact Sheet' there was a estimated 154,000 Americans that would of died to lung cancer in 2018. Tobacco smoking contributes to all types of cancer.
This is why Vaping, which should cut these lung cancer rates by over 95%, is one of the most important public health break-throughs in recent memory.
If allowed to continue to exist in the way it is now it should do more to cut down on cancer deaths then billions of dollars in medical research spent in the past 20 years.
People have found that vaping is massively more effective at helping them to quit smoking compared to patches, gum, or any other medical-grade nicotine delivery method. It's extremely cheap, it's effective, and it's safe and has none of the side effects associated with any other type of drug being sold by doctors to help people quit.
And yet you have politicians now scrambling all over each other to flush this miracle down the toilet to protect their tax revenue and help out 'Big Tobacco'.
And when you look close at the facts behind 'vaping deaths' it's pretty obvious that these are related to drug prohibition more then anything else. These are deaths that are massively contributed to by regulation. If people bought those cartridges from gas stations or vape shops they would still be alive, but they couldn't because they were illegal in their states.
I mean smoking shouldn't really cause cancer to begin with. It really depends on how much radioactive material is in ecigs, which afaik we don't know yet.
I say fill cigarette because I use fruit flavored liquids and it helped me develop an aversion to the taste of Tobacco and smoke. A few years ago I had a few drags of a cigarette at a party and it made me want to throw up.
Not saying what I do is harmless, but it's a major harm reduction for me. I went from having some pretty serious lung issues to being able to do intense cardio workouts for several hours without any problems breathing.
I don’t vape, but if they banned flavored liquids, they better ban menthol cigarettes as well.
I agree vaping can help stop cigarette use, but I am not sure they are all equally good at this.
Their USP seems to be delivering a much higher "hit" more quickly, trying to give a hit like your first ever cigarette. Never tried one and don't intend to so have no clue how true this is, but it was definitely part of the buzz around them.
Juul owns 70% of the vape market.
Not so sure about this. If the recent lung illnesses are tied to vaping, then that really can't be true.
Also, the 154,000 dying of lung cancer would undoubtedly be those who started smoking tobacco decades ago. The overall trend of smoking tobacco is downward. That alone would decrease the future number of lung cancer deaths. Hard to pin that on vaping, which seems to be (even just a few short years after widespread adoption) is leading to sudden cases of lung illnesses/deaths.
>They say black market operators are using more thickening agents to dilute THC oil because of a crackdown by state authorities that has made the oil scarcer on the black market.
Maybe regulators should be blamed for causing a scummy black market, instead of pointing the finger at "vaping."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/potential-culprits-in-...
The few places that were moving some have mostly started selling independent vaping brands. My local petrol station now carries a couple. Still expensive, but "sanely" expensive.
With the exception of Juul, big tobacco appears to be failing badly at vaping.
There's part of me that feels like it's a health corollary to the Jevons Paradox, if you make nicotine delivery potentially less damaging, it would stand to follow you lower the risk barrier and might end up with more nicotine users than you started with.
I'm def not in high school anymore, and maybe for that reason, the messaging I've personally seen from Juul does is entirely different. Literally the only stuff I've seen from Juul in the wild has been,
* "If you weren't already smoking, don't use Juul" * "we support any effort to raise the minimum age of purchasing nicotine products to 21 (T21 laws)"
I certainly wouldn't be taken aback if this were just one face of a many-faced beast, and with the other hand they were trying to cultivate a new generation of customers.
But it's with a sort of bemused annoyance that the common refrain I've heard from activists and public policy folks ends up converging at "Juul should have never existed." The cynic in me thinks it wonderful if all our problems had the decency to never exist. It just seems aggravating of all issues, the wheels of the machine politic turn so freely for flavored e-cigarettes.
Here's the facts. Smoking is bad because smoldering organic compounds are very damaging. It doesn't matter what is being burned, all smoke is bad in roughly equal proportion to the volume of smoke being inhaled. It's why sitting by a wood-burning fireplace does as much damage as a pack of cigarettes.
(As an aside, we generally don't see the same health problems with cannabis smokers as we do with tobacco smokers. That's primarily because cannabis smokers consume significantly less volume than tobacco smokers. A pack-a-day smoker is smoldering 140 grams of dried organic material. A very heavy cannabis user might go through 7 grams of high-THC weed per week.)
So the fact is we don't really know much about the long-term health consequences of vaping. It simply hasn't been widespread for long enough for us to gather any large-scale epidemiological data. It's possible it may be very harmful. It's also possible that it may be basically harmless.
But the fact that smoking is unhealthy tells us nothing about vaping. There are no smoldering organic compounds involved in vaping. Therefore if it is unhealthy it would be because of a totally separate mechanism. In general there are very very few human activities that are as unhealthy as smoking. Heavy smoking literally quadruples all cause mortality.
There are many many activities that push humans' physiological baseline. High-altitude living, exotic or restricted diets, mega-doses of vitamins, scuba diving, high salt consumption, high-dose hallucinogens, keeping a nocturnal schedule, heavy caffeine consumption, drinking too much or too little water, being a radiation worker, artificial sweeteners, heavy manual labor, tons and tons of synthesized dyes and chemicals. Most of them are basically harmless, and none of them have anywhere near the health impact of smoking.
It would quite unexpected if vaping just coincidentally happened to be one of the few human activities that had a smoking-magnitude effect. Is it possible? Sure. Is it likely? Not at all.
As for nicotine consumption, the balance of the evidence is that it's very slightly unhealthy at worse, and potentially beneficial for neurological health.[1]
But kids adopting flavored ecigs and beginning smoking is horrible.
So we need to limit ecigs to the first use case and minimize the second otherwise ecigs/vaping could be an overall net negative.
So I do strongly favor no advertising at all and no flavors or colors except mentol or something else which appeals to existing smokers.
Existing smokers like the different flavors as well and it's definitely one of the appeals it has over smoking cigarettes.
EDIT: I'd like to make the point that I'm not a proponent of children making their own decisions as a child. We've already accepted as a society (generally) that children do not have the same agency as adults. I'm suggesting that people are allowed to inform children about the risks just as we do with smoking and drinking and allow them to make that decision when they are able to.
Perhaps I wasn't clear enough; I don't think children should be able to use vape products just as I don't think they should be drinking or smoking. I do think that they should be allowed to make that choice when they're an adult.
I've seen these arguments about enforcement frequently but we're talking about modern governments here. If Uncle Sam wants to stop flavoured smoking they will be successful. They can go after online platforms that don't shut these exchanges down, they can go after individual sellers with harsh punishments, and so on.
I very much doubt the margins on vaping products are so high that someone is going to risk their neck over it. Menthol cigarettes in the EU were banned a few years ago and I can't remember having seen one in a long time.
I think the risk from these compounds is likely an order of magnitude less than the risks of cigarette smoking, and these risks will decrease as we get more data on longer-term use for these compounds.
I read one study that found benzene formation in vapor from higher-watt devices, but not in lower ones. I think using minimum necessary power is a good harm mitigation measure until more data comes in, that would likely help with flavors as well.
Seems like stringent labeling requirements for vape juice would be a cheap win for regulators and consumers. Give us an MSDS with the exact constituents.
I.e. because THC isn't water-soluble, it has to be suspended/dissolved in some oil-based thing. Lipids + lungs = BAD.
Speculation: State governments are leveraging the hysteria to slow a loss in excise tax revenue stemming from the decline in combustible cigarette use.
So, here come the regulators again to protect big tobacco. They want strict controls on who can manufacture juice. Less competition =more profit. JUUL only has a handful of flavors compared to the thousands of alternatives. So, here come the regulators to limit the flavors. And surely it's just a coincidence that the one flavor they really want to limit it to is tobacco, Phillip Morris's bread and butter.
If you've been vaping a cucumber rosehips menthol juice every day, cigarette will taste like absolute shit. But if you only have the option of vaping tobacco flavored juice? Well, then a cigarette might not sound so bad.
Sure, I agree that JUUL hasn't been an angel, and probably are guilty of marketing to kids. But that all started being investigated well before the tainted THC carts started making people sick.
One is THC vaping solutions that are killing people.
The second is that we're currently living through a meteoric rise in nicotine addiction among teenagers. For a very long time, teenage nicotine use was going down, due to declines in smoking rates. Smoking rates still continue to decline, but nicotine vaping rates have gone up and to the right. 1 in 4 high school students are now vaping nicotine. That number is growing by ~20% year over year.
This is a public health crisis.
I'm not sure we can safely say we know the long-term impact of vaping nicotine yet.
There are also indications that the uptick in vaping has stalled the decline in cigarette smoking.
https://www.concordmonitor.com/Youth-smoking-decline-stalls-...
So we can't say if it's a health crisis.. yet. Right? We also don't know of the long-term impact of melatonin but we're not considering people consuming it when they have insomnia to be a health crisis, right?
I'm inclined to treat non-addictive melatonin and extremely-addictive nicotine differently in how we approach potential health risks.
Nictoine on its own is no more harmful than caffeine.
https://news.sky.com/story/nicotine-no-worse-than-cup-of-cof...
Quitting nicotine is a fucking struggle.
It doesn't kill you, but it has negative impacts on your life, when you aren't using. Addicts become really shitty to be around, when they haven't had their hit for a few hours.
What exactly is the public benefit to getting children addicted to a substance that is incredibly difficult to kick?
Most likely not very high.
Seems to be high enough to feel the effect. Never experienced this by just standing next to someone sipping coffee.
Oh noes the horror!!! Major public health crisis! An invasion of grumpy assholes. Basically like half of America in the morning...
Quitting either can be easy as just not doing it one day, or a fucking struggle. It depends on the person and the use.
Personally I've had an easier time putting down the vape than the coffee cup.
No, no it's not. It's a manufactured hysteria which is now used by the government to squeeze tobacco companies by the nuts. It's the new 'ear sexing' that dem kids are doing. Its parents too busy to monitor their kids and schools stretched too thin to monitor their bathrooms and hallways. No amount of regulation will fix that. Remember when Marijuana was illegal? Yeah, the kids were totally not smoking it. Thank God for the war on drugs to cut down on teens getting high.
As it should. These companies provide absolutely zero benefit to society, and rely on addicts to keep their business going, and they try to get more addicts in the process. Human greed is truly destructive.
Maybe just in counterfeit knockoffs, maybe not. It's unclear.
But why let a few facts get in the way of perfectly good outrage?
Note: I'm not a smoker, but I feel strongly that vaping has the potential to dramatically decrease smoking deaths. More research is needed in lieu of the current media and government-driven hysteria.
A four-pack of Juul pods goes for $16, and each of those four is supposed to be the equivalent of a pack. (And those are the brand-name pods.)
At minimum, I believe there should be labeling and quality controls standards, and child-safety caps. A concentration limit may be sensible as well.
I spend maybe 25 dollars a month in liquid for my tank. None of that money is going to big Tobacco which is why they are going to push for rules that force people to buy their expensive disposable products.
The job I have doesn't improve the world, I accept that. But it also doesn't make the world a worse place. I sure as hell would never work for an industry that's creating or enabling smokers. No matter how legal.