Recently, the CEO of Juul e-cigarettes issued a halfhearted apology to parents whose teens
became addicted to nicotine thanks to his company's products. But the truth is that
just like tobacco, this was all part of the plan. Joining me to talk about this is Farron
Cousins who just finished an incredible cover story for the national trial lawyer magazine.
You've been following this a long time. Farron, first thing that comes to my mind, you know,
as you know, we, our law firm handled the tobacco litigation. We wrote the first legislation
about it that was used all over the country. So we know these cats pretty bad, pretty well,
you know, it's a bad bunch of cats I guess. Give me your take on these people that are
showing up with illnesses and couple of deaths already.
Yeah, just in the last week or so, we have seen I think a 193 different people across
22 different states. One of them in Illinois, a man is dead now and it's because of some
kind of mysterious vaping related, they believe, disease. But the reason we start by saying
that is because now we got to go back and talk about what's going on with vaping? And
on the federal level from the federal government, the answer is really not much at all. There
are few regulations, if any, on what can be in these vaping liquids. What goes in there,
what people are consuming, how much nicotine it can have, and now after we've been warning
for years about the lack of regulations, now we're starting to see the consequences and
they have piled up in the last year. Okay, yeah, let me back up. We started doing
this story three or four years ago. As soon as it came on the market, we said, look, here
are the problems, and then the problem is you have this cult. I don't know how to, it's
like this cult. It really is.
I call it, I call it, it's just so weird. We do a story. We say, look, look, God bless
you if you want to vape, I don't care. But you need to know what the problems are. And
the problems are, it's not just the nicotine, it's all the other chemicals that are in,
that are included in that liquid that you're vaping.
Yeah. It's the fact that you have no, your body
has no magnitude response. In other words, if you're smoking a cigarette, you're, you
know, you smoke too much, you get respiratory issues. You kinda, you, you, you'd get the
light-headedness coming on. Not with vaping because it's coming in your system so bad.
So here's the point, you know, I know doing this story, all the, you know, all the, all
these people are going to come out, how dare you talk about vaping, vaping, because it
is a cult. I swear it, it is a cult and that's, that's the way they've built this, isn't it?
They built it with kids primarily. It is, it's become its own little subculture
here in the United States. They have vaping competitions. They have conventions and of
course these conventions are sponsored by the vaping companies. You have people out
there who swear that vaping has saved their, because it got them off regular cigarettes,
but at the same time they're saying, well, we'll you guys attacking vapes, you're, you're
doing Big Tobacco's job. But the truth is, a lot of these Big Tobacco companies, including
Juul, they've bought shares of these companies. No, you, you vapors, you're doing Big Tobacco's
job because they own these products as well. Well, Big Tobacco owns them. I mean, really,
when you get to the point where you can't objective really listened to a story, Big
Tobacco owns you. We, we saw, look it's it, it crosses generation. Happened to the baby
boomers when we first started the tobacco litigation, we were the villain because we
uncovered all these documents that showed that they had hired doctors to tell the lie.
They created literature that told the lie. They phonied up, they phonied up epidemiology
to tell the lie. Same things happen here. So that was baby boomer generation. Okay.
Now you've got young baby boomers and millennials that are part of the cult and nothing's different.
You know, they want to say we're different than mom and dad. We're clear thinkers. We're,
we, we certainly can see it. All you gotta do is look at the science here. Okay. You
look at the chemicals that are included in there. How about this? What about the fact
that in different parts of the country you have independent vaping companies that mix
their own chemicals? Talk about that. Right, see, and that's a big part of the problem
and this could be what's linked to all these vaping illnesses we see. And before you and
I talked here, I spent a good amount of time today going through the FDA's regulation website
for tobacco and e-liquid and e-cigarettes and vapes and all that. There was not a single
thing I could find going through their website on regulations about any form of federal regulation
on what can or cannot go into these vaping liquids. So, these people who are out there
independently mixing these, you know, you walk into one of those vape shops that pops
up on the corner every five months these days, they're mixing them in house. So you're putting
your life, your lungs, in the hand of some random person behind the counter who says,
oh, let me give you, this will taste good. But there's heavy metals. There is diacetyl.
We know that there are cancer causing compounds as well, and whatever else this person you
don't know is sticking into that liquid that you then heat to 400 or 500 degrees in a matter
of, you know, milliseconds and put it into your lungs and people are out there swearing,
yelling at us, telling us that this is the safest thing in the world.
Yeah, what, what it is, it is, it's, it's, it's self actualization. They, they want to
believe it, therefore they won't, it's like a, it's like talking to a Republican about
a bad policy. No, I'm a Republican. It's tribal, isn't it?
It is. I mean, it's, it's almost cult like. You see
with the Democrats, you see it with Republicans, we're in that right now. I see the same thing
happening here. Look, here, here's the point. Got about 30 seconds left. They've got ollie
ollie orange. They've got bubblegum, they've gotten, they've got all these kids' tastes
trying to go after the kids. They've even market them where they put them on the shelf
to go after children. The type of marketing they do is colors. It's all going after children.
But really it's not just the kids that go so crazy when we talk about this case.
Right. It is, it is adults who should have enough
sense to be able to think for themselves rather than having the industry think for them. And
apparently that's, that's what happens here. Well, you know, and the bottom line is this,
if this is what you're choosing to do, fantastic. You do that, that is your choice. You have
the right to do that. But don't try to convince yourself or convince other people that we
know these things are safe. All the science that has been coming out in the short decade
these things have been available, has not been flattering for vapes.
This story, I tell you, but we're going to see it with this story. We, how dare we talk
about the fact that this stuff's dangerous. Well, and eventually the documents will come
too, and it will show everything we're saying. Yeah. We'll be in trial with the documents.
The past couple of years of media coverage have been riddled with stories of survivors
sharing their stories of sexual abuse from Hollywood mogul, Harvey Weinstein, to disgraced
physician Larry Nasser to the horrific allegations against the late financial guy, Jeffrey Epstein,
who we see all the time. Yes.
Look this, this story now continues with the military.
Right. I mean this is the other new part of it.
Right. Is the military.
Yes. Talk to me about it. How bad, the me too element
has fit into this, finally. We're talking about this...
Right. Finally, and tell me how bad it is.
It's bad. I think it's been an ongoing problem for decades Pap. Everyone's known about it.
The Department of Defense has certainly known about it. All branches of the military are
impacted by sexual assault, sexual harassment, and also played with the problem of really
not being able to find an effective way to grapple with it and deal with it. They see
the impact when they finally do have people come forward and report at the VA's office
or within military ranks when they're suffering from PTSD or other problems, but it is such
a pervasive issue. Now as far as the exact number, they don't exactly know because they
believe a lot of these cases are under reported, under reported rather. But, the department
of defense did an anonymous survey and they sent it out to all branches of the military
for 2018. Based on that anonymous survey, the results were 20,500 cases of reported
sexual either assault or some sort of harass, but it was a majority of some sort of sexual
assault. And so, the majority who they found that was
a, and it's not just women, one of the least talked about parts of this is men on men sexual
assault, which is an added degree of shame and humiliation, if you will, for the victim
as to not come forward. But they did find in this latest survey that among the most
vulnerable were women 17 to 24 because most of what they found is that these women were
being attacked by people that they already knew, either superior officers or people that
they were already in close contact with. And that's what they're learning. At least, even
though these results are anonymous, they can at least say, okay, at least they feel comfortable
in this environment reporting. It's giving us an idea of what is happening, when this
is occurring, how they can deal with it. So they know the problem that exists. It's just
been a hard time getting a change in the culture to where they feel comfortable reporting it
because... Doesn't...
Sometimes when they report it, nothing happens. Doesn't part of it, doesn't part of it have
to change with women becoming a, with, with them treating women as equally as they can
both in rank and things like special ops. Yes.
You know, there are plenty of women that, you know, I've known in my lifetime that could
sit in and be part of special op kind of training. And the more that, the more that they're centered
in these various things. Yes.
Whether its ranking, whether special operations, those types of things. Then this, this does,
it, it does affect the amount of, of abuse that we're seeing. But I'm really wondering
what, what's fueling this, this problem? It's been, and we're talking about it now, but
it's been around... Right.
A long time. We did the tail hook stories. Yes.
I think you did them. Yes.
When you an anchor. A news anchor. Yes, yeah.
The tail hook story started then, we started taking a look at it. But what, what's fueling
it now? I think it's a culture of silence like you
see in a lot of institutions, but what makes the military perhaps even more vulnerable
to this is like you said, that you know historically forever, we haven't really had women necessarily
in the ranks to this extent that we've seen in the last few decades. But aside from that,
the very way that it's put together, you have unit cohesion and almost like officers in
a law enforcement unit. It's your partner, but extend that wider out to the all the people
that are in your unit. And if someone does something to you and you tell on them, even
if it was a crime, like a, a sexual assault or rape or some sort of assault, if you tell
on that person, especially if it's a superior officer, then there's this general feeling
that you have betrayed the ranks. You're no longer somebody that we can trust. And it's
almost like it takes out the poison. You're labeled with the baby and the bathwater. Throw
out the person who's complaining. Yeah.
As opposed to dealing with the problem. So, so...
Or the source of it. So I saw handling on this on something that
I read not long ago where it was talking about Israeli military where everybody's required
to be in the military. It's like requirement. Yes, yes.
And the, the assimilation of females into the military has, hasn't been totally seamless,
but it's been a lot more seamless than what we're seeing here in the United States. Because
there's no distinctions. In other words, if somebody wants to work with Mossad, if they
want to... Right.
Work at the highest ranks of military engagement in special operations, and I mean there's
no hold back. There's opportunity across the board.
Right. I think of that, it was an old movie, it was
called GI Jane something, something such as that.
Yes, I remember that. And they were trying, they were trying to
talk about this idea that we have to equalize, we have to equalize that part of the military
before we ever start treating women like they should be treated in the military. But when
I look at the Israeli experience and I look at what's happening here in the United States,
it's, it's different. In other studies that they've done in other
countries where they talk about basically putting men and women together in the military.
They found that the better the integration, the fewer reported incidents of sexual assault.
Because like you're talking about, think it goes to that idea of you're treating somebody
like an equal or maybe even going back to the idea of a healthy unit. If you're all
working together, when you know somebody, you're less inclined to believe stereotypes
about them or you're less inclined to lump them into your a less than category.
Right. So they found that, they think that that's
part of it. But part of it too, is just getting in there and feeling like you're not, you
know, that you've got some rights, making it easy to report, making it easier to investigate,
and then you have a whole nother element, which is a whole nother topic about military
law and how that helps keep a lot of these cases from coming to light.
Let's pick up with that another time. Yes
Mollye, thank you for joining me. Okay. Thanks Pap.