73or disclose the issue,
according to one of the
people familiar with
the matter. “It was a
wake-up moment, like,
Oh, my God, we have
no repeatable processes
or procedures in place,”
this person says. “It was
always learning by accident.”
A Juul spokesman said in a
statementthat the company has
alwayshadsophisticated equipment
andproperlabs that exceed industry
standards.Hesaid the company investi-
gated the pods and determined the leaks “did not con-
stitute a significant health hazard.” Regarding the e-liquid, the
spokesman confirmed that the company stopped production
and sales of a batch of e-liquid with “flavor profile variance.”
He didn’t address why customers were never notified.
Three former employees say they pressed Juul to
strengthen quality controls but were consistently rebuffed,
because the measures they suggested would have slowed the
company’s growth. Instead, they say, Juul did what one does
in Silicon Valley: Ship now, worry about bugs later. Last year,
Juul executives considered a risk management plan that would
have elevated the company’s manufacturing standards and
added a department to manageandinvestigateconsumer
complaints. “They gutted it,”s son
who worked with the company
time. A Juul spokesman said in
statement that the company
rejects these assertions
and has set up a program
to handle consumer com-
plaints, and that it’s imple-
menting a quality-control
system akin to those usedby
manufacturers of other FDA-regulatedproducts.
Juul also sent representatives into high schools. Ostensibly,
the reps were there to deliver presentations about avoid-
ing addiction. The FDA is investigating multiple complaints
that the company used these visits to effectively pitch kids
on Juuling. “Juul went after our kids,” Meredith Berkman,
co-founder of the advocacy group Parents Against Vaping
e-Cigarettes, told a hearing of a House subcommittee on con-
sumer policy this summer. Berkman told the congressional
panel that a Juul rep told her son’s ninth grade classroom that
Juul was for adults, not for kids. But after the session, the rep
pulled out a Juul and talked it up to the boy, comparing it to an
iPhone. Berkman said her son has Juuled but no longer does.
From the beginning, Juul’s official stance has been that its
prime targets are smokers age 25 to 45. But some former insid-
ers say they soon realized its products and marketing events
appealed to a younger crowd. Scott Dunlap, who was chiefmarketing officer of Pax Labs when the first Juul was released,
says the crowd for one of the early Juul launch events clearly
wasn’t in the 25-to-45 demo. He recalls thinking, “Oh, God,
look how young they all are.”
Last year the FDA asked Juul to turn
over documents related to its marketing
practices. The agency also began con-
ducting sting operations to catch retail-
ers selling Juuls to minors. By then, Juuls
wereeverywhere.The 2018 NationalYouth
TobaccoSurveyshowedthatanestimated
3.6millionmiddleandhighschoolstu-
dentsusede-cigarettes, an increase of
morethan70%fromthepreviousyear.
“Thesedatashockmyconscience,”the
FDA’sthen-commissioner, Scott Gottlieb,
said at a press conference last fall. There
was, he said, an “epidemic use of elec-
tronic cigarettes and nicotine addiction among kids.”
One in nine U.S. high school seniors say they now vape
almost daily, according to a study published last month in the
New England Journal of Medicine. That’s one reason this year’s
spateofvapingsicknesshasfreakedouthealthauthorities.
Anotheris thatit’slaidbarejusthowlittleis knownaboutthe
fine-particle substances people are inhaling deep into their
lungs. Juul and other e-cigarette makers now have to submit
applications to the FDA by May for approval to keep selling
theirproducts.
And while research shows
that e-cigarettes are likely
safer than the regular kind,
because they don’t appear
to produce many of the
carcinogens that burning
tobacco does, vaping sim-
plyhasn’t been around long
enoughfor researchers to con-
ductconclusivelong-term trials. In July a
CNBCreporteraskedJuul’sthen-CEO Burns about the impact
of chronic vaping. “Frankly, we don’t know,” he said.
For some former Juul insiders, this is the ethical quandary.
The product can cut into sales of combustible cigarettes and
obviate their woeful health impacts, but it’s less clear how or
whether users are supposed to quit using their Juuls, which
gets tougher if they’ve signed up for the automatic-refill pro-
gram to get pods shipped directly to their door. The former
employees grimace at the prospect of hooking millions more
teenagers on nicotine.
Dunlap, Juul’s former marketing chief, says his nieces
sometimes reverently introduce him to their friends as the
guy who helped launch Juul, which makes him cringe. “I’ll
tell them nicotine is a chemically addictive substance, and it’s
illegal for teenagers for goodreason,”hesays.“Unfortunately,
sometimes the next responseI getfromthosesameteensis,
‘Wait, there’s nicotine in this?’” <BW> �With Shelly BanjoOctober14, 2019JUUL HQ: JASON HENRY/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
“Oh, God,
look how young
they all are”