Juul Labs announced on September 3rd that it would be reducing its workforce, allegedly because of the coronavirus pandemic. According to The Wall Street Journal, that will be over half its remaining employees. Earlier this year Juul cut approximately one-third of its workers and stopped sales of its vaporizers in several countries. The September announcement came one day after Washington State filed suit against Juul, alleging the company designed its products to appeal to teens: “Upon the launch of the device, the company flooded social media with colorful ads of young-looking models and pushed fruit and dessert flavored products.”
The Juul Labs announcement of the cutbacks said it was trying “to place the company on a pathway to fulfill its mission by earning trust of key stakeholders while combating underage use.” Throughout 2020 the company said they had continued to carefully evaluate how to allocate its resources, in an evolving category (i.e., vaping devices) lacking in trust. “The global pandemic and ongoing economic crisis have thrown in a level of uncertainty round the world for which we have to prepare.” They plan to prioritize their resources to execute their long-term, focused approach seems to be an attempt to position Juul as a harm reduction product for adult smokers. Juul said these investments will not provide short-term revenue, but they will help the company earn trust and “build a company for the long term to advance the potential for harm reduction for adult smokers and combat underage usage.”
As such, we will be making a significant global reduction in force, and we will be exploring the possibility of exiting a variety of markets in EMEA and APAC that have not provided the kind of return necessary given the cost to continue investing in the market. In any potential new market, we would ensure that we can have science and evidence-based conversations with stakeholders before entering and that vapor products can effectively compete with combustible cigarettes.
Marketing Juul’s e-cigarette as a harm reduction tool for adult smokers may be part of the company’s new marketing strategy, but it also seems this claim was revisionist history of its earlier approach. In January 2019, The New York Times published, “Juul’s Convenient Smoke Screen,” referred to Juul’s TV advertising campaign, “Make the Switch,” as a “new pitch.” It had just taken in a $12.8 billion investment from Altria, the giant tobacco company behind Marlboro. “Now, after making billions of dollars and joining forces with Big Tobacco, Juul is billing itself as a public-health crusader.” There is evidence suggesting Juul Labs did not always have a public health agenda and cannot even enforce no vaping regulations within its own headquarters.
In 2018, Juul Labs told its employees that California-based employees can no longer vape at their desks, enforcing a 2016 California law that banned e-cigarettes in the workplace. But even though the company banned vaping in compliance with state and local laws, employees continued to use their e-cigarettes as their desks. One employee said it was like something straight out of the TV show Mad Men: “Just replace the cigarettes with e-cigarettes.” While some employees hide their Juuls in sweater sleeves, The Wall Street Journal reported the company’s co-founders and others continued to do it openly. “Even the threat of being fired after a fourth vaping offense hasn’t seemed to have done much.” If Juul Labs can’t stop its own employees from vaping at its offices, so how can it credibly pursue a market position as a harm reduction product?
A research and development engineer who helped create the original Juul device said the company didn’t think a lot about addiction because they were not trying to design a cessation product. “Anything about health is not on our mind.” That R&D engineer is still with Juul. In other early interviews, James Monsees, the co-founder and chief-product officer of Juul, played down the idea of a public health mission. In a 2014 interview posted on YouTube, he said the company was not an activist company. “If you don’t like what we’re making better than cigarettes, then have a cigarette, that’s fine.” The impression left is that Juul was presenting its pod as an alternative to cigarettes.
Monsees admitted the company had been forced to be cautious about its marketing. Federal regulations forbid it from promoting its device as a smoking cessation tool, but permits Juul to claim it is a “switching product” for smokers. He said in the January 2019 NYT article that since 2005 he and Adam Bowen, the other co-founder of Juul, have been focused on creating a product to help people switch away from combustible cigarettes. That is a subtle, but different goal than seeing Juul as a harm reduction product. The co-founders’ graduate thesis presentation pitched vaping as a healthier substitute for cigarettes. Interestingly, James Monsees announced his plan to step down as an advisor and board member of Juul Labs in March of 2020; and the YouTube video in which he said Juul Labs was not an activist company has been removed.
Few of the company’s early ads mentioned the risks of cigarettes or advocated for smokers to switch. Instead, they voiced how “Smoking evolved” and how it’s vaping device was “built to satisfy.” There was even a “launch party.” The president of the antismoking advocacy group, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, said Juul’s ad campaign was little more than a P.R. effort aimed at lawmakers and regulators. “Juul has engaged in all the traditional tactics of a company that is trying to fend off meaningful regulation, rather than actually change their behavior . . . That is classic Big Tobacco.”
Juul’s attempt to convince the public it became a teen sensation by accident is disingenuous (See “Not The End Of Smoking”). Juul products has been facing significant scrutiny for concerns over their health risks and marketed to young people for some time. Drugwatch reported there were currently 758 Juul lawsuits from around the U.S. The cases represent both class action lawsuits and personal injury cases, and the litigation is expected to continue to grow. Many of the lawsuits claim Juul marketed to minors, but the company denies this. “Most of the initial lawsuits in the mass litigation were filed before reports of widespread vaping-related lung injuries and deaths began coming up in mid-2019.”
The first wrongful death lawsuit was filed in October of 2019. A former senior vice president at Juul claimed he was fired after he raised the alarm when 1 million contaminated, mint-flavored Juul pods were shipped to retailers and consumers. He also claimed the company repeatedly sold expired products over his protests. A pair of Alabama college students filed suit in 2019 claiming they developed serious lung problems from vaping Juuls. As of August 2019, the FDA has identified 127 reports of vaping-related seizures or neurological symptoms.
Seizures are a known side effect of nicotine toxicity. “But many teens don’t realize nicotine is an e-cigarette danger.” When Juul e-cigarettes were first on the market, they delivered almost two to five times more nicotine than other e-cigarettes. Maxwell Berger’s lawsuit claimed the massive stroke that left him with a speech impediment, paralysis on his left side and a loss of vision in each eye before he turned 20 was the result of smoking two-Juul-pods-a-day.
Washington State filed suit against Juul Labs on September 2, 2020 alleging the company designed its product to appeal to underage consumers and was deceptive about the addictiveness of its product. Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson also claimed Juul misled consumers by not mentioning their cigarette pods contained nicotine. A 2018 survey by Truth Initiative found that 63% of Juul users did not know the product contained nicotine. Robin Koval, CEO and president of Truth initiative, said:
Unfortunately, young people are unaware that JUUL packs a powerful nicotine punch with a single cartridge equal to an entire pack of cigarettes. This escalates the urgency for Food and Drug Administration FDA) regulation and public education regarding the risks for young people.
In 2020, all health-related concerns appear to have some sort of a connection to the COVID pandemic and that is true for e-cigarettes as well. In “Vaping Links to Covid Risk Are Becoming Clear,” The New York Times said experts have warned since the start of the pandemic that the coronavirus, a respiratory pathogen, likely capitalizes on the damaged lungs of smokers and vapers. Doctors and researchers are beginning to pinpoint how smoking and vaping seem to boost the virus’s ability to spread from person to person, infiltrating the lungs and sparking some of COVID-19’s worst symptoms. Doctor Stephanie Lovinsky-Desir, a pediatric pulmonologist at Columbia University, said: “I have no doubt in saying that smoking and vaping could put people at increased risk of poor outcomes from COVID-19.”
While several studies have found smoking can more than double a person’s risk of severe COVID-19 symptoms, the data on vaping and COVID are just beginning to emerge. A team of researchers reported in the Journal of Adolescent Health that a COVID-19 diagnosis was five times more likely among young adults who vape and seven times more likely among dual users—those who vape and smoke cigarettes. “Youth using e-cigarettes and dual-users of e-cigarettes and cigarettes are at greater risk of COVID-19. Given the predominance of e-cigarette use among U.S. youth, our investigation informs public health concerns that the ongoing youth e-cigarette epidemic contributes to the current COVID-19 pandemic.”
Our findings from a national sample of adolescents and young adults show that e-cigarette use and dual use of e-cigarettes and cigarettes are significant underlying risk factors for COVID-19 that has previously not been shown. The findings have direct implications for health care providers to ask all youth and COVID-19–infected youth about cigarette and e-cigarette use history; for parents, schools, and community-based organizations to guide youth to learn more about how e-cigarettes and dual use affect the respiratory and immune systems; for the Food and Drug Administration to effectively regulate e-cigarettes during the COVID-19 pandemic; and for the development and dissemination of youth-focused COVID-19 prevention messaging to include e-cigarette and dual use.
A study published in 2018 did not find switching to ENDS (electronic nicotine delivery systems) helped adult smokers quit. Juul Labs marketing did target youthful users, as one look at the youthful-looking models in the above link “early ads” will show. And Juul’s harm reduction rhetoric is empty, as it can’t even rein in its own employees.