If you don't look carefully
though, you might miss what it's advertising.
It's this little thing and
it's called:
Juul, Juul, Juul
looks more like a flash drive or computer device but it is
really another kind of e-cigarette.
Since it launched in 2015
Juul has taken over about 70% of the e-cigarette retail market share. It's now
worth about 16 billion dollars. And that success is often attributed to its sleek
design, but the same features that make Juul a well-engineered product also
make it attractive to young people, many of whom have never smoked before and
that has people worried because devices like Juul might be designed to help
smokers get off cigarettes, but they're also addicting a new generation to
nicotine.
So what makes this one e-cigarette so different from the rest?
Answering that question starts with what you see on the outside. Juul is an
e-cigarette, but it really doesn't look like one. It looks like a tech product
and it's tiny. That allows smokers to get a nicotine fix without having to worry
about social stigma, but also allows young users to consume nicotine
inconspicuously without having to worry about who sees them.
Going to school
having this in your pocket is a lot better than having like something this
big, that looks kind of like a lightsaber, you know? You could kind of Juul
anywhere in discreteness.
That discreteness is a big shift for
e-cigarettes. Since the first patent in 1930 designs haven't been very subtle.
The first generation of e-cigarettes mimicked the shape size and colors of
traditional cigarettes, sometimes even with a fake light-up tip. The second and
third generations focused on larger and more customizable devices, with longer
battery life and big plumes of vapor.
Then came the Juul, a stripped-down
version with no buttons, no big plumes of vapor, and no complex refilling or
recharging and it comes in a variety of bright colors that set it apart from
other e-cigarettes. Which made it look like a tech product that young people
were already familiar with.
That is why people called Juul the "iPhone of e-cigs."
And that similarity makes sense. Juul's founders met at Stanford design
school and one worked as a design engineer at Apple.
They created the first e-cigarette that looked more like a cool
gadget and less like a drug delivery device.
This wasn't smoking or vaping, it
was Juuling.
Yeah like how grandma's have iPhones now, it's kind of like normal.
Kids have Juuls now, because it looks so modern. We kind of trust modern
stuff a little bit more, so we're like we can use it we're not gonna have any
trouble with it, because you can trust it.
The tech aspect definitely helps
people get introduced to it and then once they're introduced to it
they're staying, because they're conditioned to like all these different
products and then this is another product and it's just another product
until you're addicted to nicotine.
And that is where it gets tricky. A 2017
study found that 25% of 15-24 year-olds recognize the Juul in a photo,
but the majority of them didn't know that it always contains nicotine. It's
easy to trace that information gap. You just have to look at the ads. When you
look at Juul's marketing today you find video testimonials from adult ex-smokers.
My name is Lauren. My name is Brandy. My name is Carolyn.
My name is Iman, I'm 38. But when Juul first launched, their marketing looked a
lot different.
When you put those ads alongside old cigarette ads, the
similarities are pretty striking.
Both marketed relaxation, sharing, travel,
freedom, and sex appeal.
It's now illegal for cigarette brands to use these kinds
of suggestive advertising themes,
but for e-cigarette manufacturers
who had products on the market
before 2016, those strategies are still unregulated. That's why a brand like
Kandypens can be promoted in DJ Khaled music videos, just like tobacco
corporations used to pay stars to smoke their cigarettes on screen.
But compared
to cigarettes, Juuls are a lot easier to start using. Typical e-cigarettes have
between six and thirty milligrams of nicotine per milliliter of vape liquid.
One Juul pod packs in 59 milligrams. That's three times the nicotine levels
permitted in the European Union, which is why Juul isn't sold there. But here in
the US, e-cigarettes don't have the same restrictions even though we know
that nicotine dependency can prime developing brains for future substance
abuse disorders.
The company says that Juul's nicotine content is about as much
as a pack of cigarettes, though tobacco experts say it's likely more than that.
And Juuls have a patented system for delivering that nicotine. Most e-cigarettes
use a potent version of nicotine called freebase that gives users a strong hit,
but Juuls vaporize a liquid made from nicotine salts.
Those salts allow
nicotine to be absorbed into the body at about the same speed as regular
cigarettes, much faster than most e-cigarettes.
But unlike freebase nicotine
which can be irritating, nicotine salt goes down smoothly.
So Juul packs a
bigger nicotine dose into a much more pleasant hit than most devices on the
market and that has public health officials worried because the US
almost beat nicotine addiction among kids.
As cigarette smoking among those
under 18 has fallen, the use of other nicotine products and especially e-cigarettes
has taken a drastic leap.
In April, the FDA demanded that Juul submit
documents on its marketing and research.
A group of senators sent a letter asking
Juul to stop using flavors and designs that appeal to children and there are now
three lawsuits alleging that Juul contains too much nicotine.
In response,
to the concerns the makers of Juul have pledged thirty million dollars to
combat underage use.
Merchandise and marketing materials now have big warning
labels on them and the company is developing lower nicotine pods. The
trouble is there's still a lot we don't know about the long-term health impacts
of e-cigarettes.
Juul, like other e-cigarettes might have set out to
design a solution to a public health problem, but in a lot of ways their
product has created a new one.