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there is a legitimate debate over whether
e- cigarettes are safer for adult smokers
than traditional cigarettes, and whether
they can help addicts quit smoking, crit-
ics argue that Juul has assiduously fol-
lowed Big Tobacco’s playbook: aggres-
sively marketing to youth and making
implied health claims a central pillar of
its business plan. Juul maintains that it
is not Big Tobacco 2.0. In eight months,
unless e-cigarette companies can prove to
the FDA that vaping is “appropriate for
the protection of public health,” the prod-
ucts could be pulled from the market.
That would curtail youth use, but some
fear it could also cut off adult smokers’
access to a potentially beneficial product.
Juul, which was valued at $38 billion
by its investors before the Trump Admin-
istration’s crackdown, is now facing
what CEO Kevin Burns in July called an
“ existential” threat, due to rising levels
of youth use. Lobbyists, staff scientists
and PR experts are working feverishly
to respond to the growing public out-
rage. “Sh-t happens,” Burns told TIME
in July, foreshadowing the rocky summer
to come. “We’ve got to respond. I would
love it to be less dynamic here than it is,
because it’s not easy on the organization.
But I think the organization understands
that we’re at the forefront here and it’s
going to be volatile.” Juul says that it does
not make health claims and that it has
never marketed to youth. The company
has taken recent steps to make it harder
for young people to illegally buy its prod-
ucts, both online and in stores.
Nobody hates Juul more than par-
ents, many of whom are watching their
children fall prey to the “epidemic on
speed” that is Juuling, as New York
parent Erin Mills puts it. She blames
her son’s two-year addiction to Juuls
for causing his grades and social life to
plummet, while she says she and her
husband watched helplessly. It’s “like
this tsunami,” she says, “and I see my
child going under.”
To help parents like Mills, New York
City mothers Meredith Berkman, Dorian
Fuhrman and Dina Alessi formed the
advocacy group Parents Against Vap-
ing E- Cigarettes in 2018. It has grown to
about a dozen chapters across the coun-
try. Berkman argued at a congressio-
nal hearing in July that today’s kids are
becoming “an entire generation of nico-
tine addicts” and “human guinea pigs forthe Juul experiment.” Filmmaker Judd
Apatow made his opinion clear on Sept. 9,
tweeting, “Juul is some evil sh-t... Keep
your kids away from it. It’s a scam to get
you addicted.”
Hundreds of U.S. school districts have
installed electronic vape detectors in
their bathrooms—or “Juul rooms”—and
one in Alabama went further, removing
some bathroom doors to make it harder
to vape in secret. But the product’s design
has complicated that task. Juul’s $35 sleek
slate gray and silver e-cigs are often com-
pared to flash drives or iPhones, in sharp
contrast to the clunky, tank-style devices
that preceded them. They’re small
enough to fit in the palm of your hand and
subtly vaporize pods of liquid containing
nicotine, flavorings and other chemicals.
A four-pack costs $16, and each 200-puff
pod delivers as much nicotine as a pack
of 20 cigarettes.
Halving cigarette-smoking rates
since the 1960s remains one of Amer-
ica’s biggest public-health triumphs,
even though smoking—which is re-
sponsible for more than 480,000 deaths
annually— remains the leading cause of
preventable death in the U.S. Teen ciga-
rette smoking, too, had seen historic de-
clines in recent years. Now that hard-
won success may be in peril.△
E-cigarettes vaporize a potent
liquid packed with nicotine,
flavorings and other chemicals