On Dec. 7, Juul Labs announced that it has agreed to settle roughly 5,000 lawsuits that involved about 10,000 plaintiffs for an undisclosed sum in a Northern California court case, per The New York Times. The cases all involve the sales and marketing of Juul’s e-cigarettes to teenagers. This news comes after Juul’s Sept. 6 settlement of $438.5 million in a two-year investigation into its marketing practices, jointly conducted by 33 states.
As part of the settlements, the e-cigarette company will stop marketing practices that the investigation noted as targeting youth, including funding education programs in schools and advertising on social media. Connecticut Attorney General William Tong called out the company for engaging in “predatory marketing,” per the Wall Street Journal.
According to Sarah R. London, colead counsel for the plaintiffs, these settlements will give “meaningful” compensation to victims and their families, provide funds to school programming, and ultimately prevent e-cigarette usage in the US. “The scope of these suits is enormous,” London said in a statement.
Juul is also eager to move forward. A spokesperson for the company said the settlements are a step forward in “securing the company’s path forward to fulfill its mission to transition adult smokers away from combustible cigarettes while combating underage use.”
Prior to these lawsuits, Juul was also hit with a sales ban from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). On June 23, the FDA issued “marketing denial orders (MDOs) to JUUL Labs Inc. for all of their [Juul] products currently marketed in the United States” and also added that “those currently on the U.S. market must be removed, or risk enforcement action.” But the ban was put on hold two weeks later to further review Juul’s marketing application.
So with all of the controversy surrounding the products, what exactly made Juul so popular in the first place? Simply put, it’s “just cool,” says Stanton Glantz, PhD, medical professor and director of the UCSF Center For Tobacco Research Control and Education, who has published several studies on the effects of e-cigarettes. “It looks like a flash drive. It’s very high tech and fun.” E-cigarettes also don’t look like cigarettes, which means they don’t typically come with the same negative stigma.
Vaping, aka smoking e-cigarettes, has skyrocketed in popularity over the last few years, especially among teenagers, for whom e-cigarettes are illegal. And while overall tobacco-use numbers are down for teenagers in the US, e-cigarette smoking continues to be the most popular tobacco product among the age group, according to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (Though e-cigarettes don’t contain tobacco, they’re still referred to as “tobacco products.”) That popularity has led the FDA to crack down on all e-cigarette products, but especially the ultrapopular Juul, which attracted teens in particular with its sweet flavors (like mango and crème brûlée), easily inhaled vapor, and savvy marketing campaigns.
The market around Juul and other e-cigarettes are sure to change as new FDA bans and the recent Juul lawsuits fall into place. But before we get into that, let’s talk about why vaping, especially among minors, has become such a concern in the first place.
What Is Vaping?
Vaping is the same thing as smoking an e-cigarette. (You can also vape cannabis, but we’ll be focusing on the tobacco product for this article.) The name gives you a clue as to how it works. Regular cigarettes burn tobacco, creating a smoke that the user inhales. E-cigarettes, on the other hand, don’t burn anything. The technology consists of a “tiny toaster coil,” as Dr. Glantz describes it, wrapped around a wick (similar to a candle wick). That apparatus is soaked in a liquid, “usually propylene glycol, vegetable glycerin, flavorants, and nicotine,” Dr. Glantz says. By inhaling, you heat the coil around the saturated wick. That creates a vapor of ultrafine particles, including nicotine, that you breathe into your lungs.
In other words, when you’re smoking, you’re inhaling smoke. When you’re vaping, you’re inhaling a vapor. “Both cigarettes and e-cigarettes generate these aerosols of ultrafine particles in order to give you a hard nicotine hit,” Dr. Glantz explains, but the distinction between burning and vaporizing is a crucial one.
