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Comment by bananabreakfast | Hacker News Reader

They're also responsible for countless smokers quitting cigarettes for something far less carcinogenic.

It is very reductive of you to just group people into being comic book villains.

This argument is akin to saying "sure, he murders people by night, but he's a fire fighter by day so it's ok".

The kids being addicted to nicotine weren't even collateral damage. They were being explicitly targeted. Doing good doesn't excuse doing evil.

I'd say it's more akin to, "He flipped the switch to divert the train from running over 3 people, although the other track still had it running over one person."

As an alternative - vaping flipped the switch to divert the train from three to a single person - Juul flipped the switch later down the line to make sure it still hit three people anyways.

I don't follow -- how did they cause more harm to existing smokers? Are you saying that a Juul is more dangerous (or even equally as dangerous) as smoking -- or that there's evidence that nicotine in and of itself is harmful? I don't think either has evidence to suggest it's true.

Oh sorry - they continued the trend of lowered harm to existing smokers, but they also developed a lot of new customers.

I work in a company with a lot of coops and just in the past three years a lot of the folks we've hired on have a nicotine addiction - there are more people in their twenties that vape or smoke than people in their thirties or forties.

No, it's not really akin to that. This isn't a trolley experiment with only two tracks; they could have chosen to not market their product to children.

They targeted them at young adults -- it turns out that kids in high school typically emulate college kids. Who knew? Go to any college bar and you'll see kids -- naive children -- smoking outside. A lot of those kids use Juuls instead now.

If targeting that demographic inherently means that highschoolers will look at them and think they're cool, does that mean nobody should ever target that demographic? Harm reduction only applies to the 30+ crowd?

edit: I also don't think that it's really fair to say that they advertised towards children. The worst they did was push some colorful and fruity flavors. I guess only children like sweet things, and once you turn 18 you can no longer like mangoes?

It shouldn't be legal to market tobacco products at all. Juul knowingly and deliberately marketing to kids is further proof of that, as if any more were needed.

> They targeted them at young adults

This is literally the same bullshit the same industry was spewing when they were advertising their cigarettes with cartoon characters (e.g. the cartoon camel.)

No, Juul openly and deliberately advertised to children. It used to run ad campaigns featuring high-school age models vaping, and as recently as last year paid hundreds of high-school age "influencers" to peddle their products.

Article re: the above: https://www.businessinsider.com/juul-congress-e-cigs-target-... . There's nothing accidental about this.

Just to be clear -- when you say high-school age, you really mean 18 year olds, right? And coincidentally, that's also college aged, right?

What's the argument here? That they should have casted 40 year olds for their marketing campaign? Or that they should have casted someone in their 20s instead of an 18 year old? The former is ridiculous and the latter doesn't make a difference. Natalia Dyer is 25 years old and plays an 18 year old in Stranger Things.

Just to clarify - regardless of whether they cast someone 18 or 17 - they were intent on casting young adults in advertising - this wasn't an effort on their part to make sure 40 year olds are aware of a way to safely quite smoking, it was a deliberate effort to hook new consumers since... even within the range stretching up to 20-23, those potential customers will be conversions from non-smokers in all likelihood.

Where is the evidence that kids were explicitely targeted? Kids can't buy these unless some adult consumer or a shop clerk is breaking the law. Flavored vodkas aren't treated with similar scorn, but you know 14 year old kids are getting faced off of blueberry smirnoff and not rye whiskey.

>>The Food and Drug Administration on Monday came out swinging at e-cigarette giant Juul over a variety of its unproven safety claims and startling marketing practices—most notably saying without evidence that its products are safer than smoking traditional cigarettes and giving presentations directly to kids in schools—in at least one alleged case, without teachers present or parental consent.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/09/juul-gave-presentati...

The were speaking directly to students inside schools. Kids. They were telling them that their products were safe. You don't see toy companies doing that.

That's cartoonishly exploitative. Juul should be fined for this predatory marketing.

They should face jail time.

Even better. Prosecute 'em.

Vaping is far safer than smoking - and there are countless studies and piles of evidence that prove this.

As evidence - https://www.gov.uk/government/news/e-cigarettes-around-95-le...

Now, I'm not saying it's safe. I'm not saying Juul didn't market unethically - just "vaping is better than smoking"

And if you can accept this overwhelmingly clear evidence - the cynic in you might ponder why there's an outrage over vaping, whilst cigarettes are still happily sold/taxed/lobbied.

Nothing you said in any way replies to the person you responded to. You are arguing against a straw man.

Anecdotally my 3 year old saw a picture of a Juul in an ad and thought it was a juice box.

The addiction to nicotine is nothing to scoff at, but they were taking a page out of the big tobacco brands' play book. The same people that go after Juul and disregard regular tobacco brands is something, seeing how they are just doing what big tobacco has always done. There are a lot of people angry over those kids being targeted by Juul, but fail to see big tobacco next door, causing as much, if not more damage due to the nature of their product. Both should fail, but I would rather have an ecosystem of Ecigs(for adults) vs the waste and carnage that big tobacco has done for decades.

> they were taking a page out of the big tobacco brands' play book

Indeed. Note Altria's large investment in Juul.

However, much of Juul's innovation was figuring out how to evade tobacco laws and regulations such as bans on advertising and flavored tobacco products (e.g. by claiming to not be a tobacco product) and how to escape much of the stigma associated with tobacco (e.g. by making something that looked more like an Apple product and less like a cigarette.)

Evading legislation and industry regulation is a powerful business strategy while it lasts - consider Airbnb (avoided hotel tax), Uber/Lyft (avoided taxi medallion limits), Paypal (avoided bank regulation) and cable companies (avoided telecom regulation while providing phone service.)

Juul is big tobacco.

This is a very tired point I see very often when discussing the morality of people who provide value to society.

If Juul's service was solely and specifically helping people get off cigarettes, great. It's not though, is it? They sell nicotine to minors. If they cared about doing good, they would simply not sell nicotine to minors. By this judgement I can group the executives at Juul into villians and not be 'reductive' about it, because it's very clear they make profit off of evil when they don't have to.

I'd also not like to see the argument that they aren't technically 'selling' juuls too minors. We're way past that point; it's super obvious the advertising is made up in such a way as to facilitate profits from minors. Just because it goes through a 3rd party doesn't eliminate blame from Juul, who remember have taken no steps to prevent children from smoking them.

I disagree - vaping allowed those smokers to quit. Juul took vaping and made it hip - none of the positive effects of vaping came from Juul.

Juul became massively popular because it hit much harder than typical cheap gas station vape pens of the time and the pods came in around the same price as a pack of smokes, or cheaper. Vaping has been around for over a decade and there are plenty of smokers that never considered it a viable alternative because it was a huge investment -- only to find out that it didn't hit in any way comparable to the way that a cigarette would. Juul changed all that.

Juul and similar salt nicotine vapes are only way to get a cigarette like nicotine buzz without having a leaky pipe bomb in your pocket where you have to regularly use ohms law to change your coils.

Come on, "use ohms law to change your coils"?

What a bunch of bullshit.

In what way is that quote "bullshit"?

If you wrap your own coils and you don't throw it on your ohm meter before throwing it on your battery mod, idk what to tell you. Even if you've done it 100 times it takes 1 second to make sure you have good contact between your wraps like you expect. I used to do this dude.

I feel bad for lower level workers there. Anyone who had options to work elsewhere I have no mercy for. Anyone in the product team responsible for the ideation of marketing to children, can eat shit.

They're the only major brand that allows smokers to easily get mega doses of nicotine. It isn't much of a quitting aid if it only strengthens the addiction.

I'm not sure Juul in particular contributed all that much to that. Other vaporizer companies had already made great strides on that front by the time Juul came on the scene. It seems like their USP was marketing toward children.

If they really had an altruistic mission, then it was their responsibility to protect that mission, and they blew it. Pivoting their product to target kids was their own choice, and they are responsible for the consequences that were obvious to everybody.

A more straightforward explanation is that the altruistic mission was always fake.

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