And he is being replaced by a former Marlboro employee. I am sure the public will feel so much safer knowing that the advertising will be handled by a Big Tobacco veteran moving forward.
The public should probably feel a bit better about having a tobacco veteran who knows better than to get the bosses in trouble by deliberately market to kids. Juul's former CEO took the startup strategy: disruptfluence the vape market by winnovating a "let's just sell them in high schools directly" strategy.
All the 'big names' companies like 'Juul' and 'Blu' are heavily invested in by 'Big Tobacco'. These are the companies you see in gas stations and convenience stores across the America.
But these big companies can't compete with all the Vape Shops that are insanely popular and are everywhere.
This is why there is just a big hubbub over regulation and the deaths over black market Marijuana cartridges. These massive corporations can afford to deal with things like FDA certification of flavors and such things.
Were as the small companies, that make up the bulk of the vape market, cannot. So they will get pushed out of the market and 'big tobacco' will be the only ones that are allowed to sell in the USA. They really don't care if they have bad names and are used as targets by the regulators when they are going to be the only ones allowed to sell to the public.
Governments are going along with this because tobacco is a massive tax base. They can't regulate small business and internet sales in the same manner they can regulate and tax a small number of massive corporations.
According to 'Lung Cancer Fact Sheet' there was a estimated 154,000 Americans that would of died to lung cancer in 2018. Tobacco smoking contributes to all types of cancer.
This is why Vaping, which should cut these lung cancer rates by over 95%, is one of the most important public health break-throughs in recent memory.
If allowed to continue to exist in the way it is now it should do more to cut down on cancer deaths then billions of dollars in medical research spent in the past 20 years.
People have found that vaping is massively more effective at helping them to quit smoking compared to patches, gum, or any other medical-grade nicotine delivery method. It's extremely cheap, it's effective, and it's safe and has none of the side effects associated with any other type of drug being sold by doctors to help people quit.
And yet you have politicians now scrambling all over each other to flush this miracle down the toilet to protect their tax revenue and help out 'Big Tobacco'.
And when you look close at the facts behind 'vaping deaths' it's pretty obvious that these are related to drug prohibition more then anything else. These are deaths that are massively contributed to by regulation. If people bought those cartridges from gas stations or vape shops they would still be alive, but they couldn't because they were illegal in their states.
I have a very mixed reaction to all the e-cigarette shenanigans.
There's part of me that feels like it's a health corollary to the Jevons Paradox, if you make nicotine delivery potentially less damaging, it would stand to follow you lower the risk barrier and might end up with more nicotine users than you started with.
I'm def not in high school anymore, and maybe for that reason, the messaging I've personally seen from Juul does is entirely different. Literally the only stuff I've seen from Juul in the wild has been,
* "If you weren't already smoking, don't use Juul"
* "we support any effort to raise the minimum age of purchasing nicotine products to 21 (T21 laws)"
I certainly wouldn't be taken aback if this were just one face of a many-faced beast, and with the other hand they were trying to cultivate a new generation of customers.
But it's with a sort of bemused annoyance that the common refrain I've heard from activists and public policy folks ends up converging at "Juul should have never existed." The cynic in me thinks it wonderful if all our problems had the decency to never exist. It just seems aggravating of all issues, the wheels of the machine politic turn so freely for flavored e-cigarettes.
I've noticed a major cognitive bias most people have regarding vaping. Basically along the lines of "smoking's very bad for health, therefore vaping (or nicotine consumption) is probably pretty bad too".
Here's the facts. Smoking is bad because smoldering organic compounds are very damaging. It doesn't matter what is being burned, all smoke is bad in roughly equal proportion to the volume of smoke being inhaled. It's why sitting by a wood-burning fireplace does as much damage as a pack of cigarettes.
(As an aside, we generally don't see the same health problems with cannabis smokers as we do with tobacco smokers. That's primarily because cannabis smokers consume significantly less volume than tobacco smokers. A pack-a-day smoker is smoldering 140 grams of dried organic material. A very heavy cannabis user might go through 7 grams of high-THC weed per week.)
So the fact is we don't really know much about the long-term health consequences of vaping. It simply hasn't been widespread for long enough for us to gather any large-scale epidemiological data. It's possible it may be very harmful. It's also possible that it may be basically harmless.
But the fact that smoking is unhealthy tells us nothing about vaping. There are no smoldering organic compounds involved in vaping. Therefore if it is unhealthy it would be because of a totally separate mechanism. In general there are very very few human activities that are as unhealthy as smoking. Heavy smoking literally quadruples all cause mortality.
There are many many activities that push humans' physiological baseline. High-altitude living, exotic or restricted diets, mega-doses of vitamins, scuba diving, high salt consumption, high-dose hallucinogens, keeping a nocturnal schedule, heavy caffeine consumption, drinking too much or too little water, being a radiation worker, artificial sweeteners, heavy manual labor, tons and tons of synthesized dyes and chemicals. Most of them are basically harmless, and none of them have anywhere near the health impact of smoking.
It would quite unexpected if vaping just coincidentally happened to be one of the few human activities that had a smoking-magnitude effect. Is it possible? Sure. Is it likely? Not at all.
As for nicotine consumption, the balance of the evidence is that it's very slightly unhealthy at worse, and potentially beneficial for neurological health.[1]
Fruity flavors were a life-saver for me, because it allowed me to distance myself from tobacco flavor so much, that it made me nauseous when I would try to smoke a real cigarette again. It just so happens that the "something else which appeals to existing smokers", e.g., fruity flavors, may also be appealing to non-smokers. However, I don't see that as a strong enough argument to ban them.
I'm curious why you feel that restricting all flavoring in e-cig juice would be a good thing. You do realize that would just push things underground and out of a somewhat regulated market even more...
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to make their own flavored juice at home after ordering the supplies... Not to mention the disrupt that would have on local business with the tens of thousands of vape shops that have popped up across the country, all of which require the customer to be 18 or 21 years old..
Alternatively we can inform children about the risks of using e-cigarettes and let them make the decision on their own?
Existing smokers like the different flavors as well and it's definitely one of the appeals it has over smoking cigarettes.
EDIT: I'd like to make the point that I'm not a proponent of children making their own decisions as a child. We've already accepted as a society (generally) that children do not have the same agency as adults. I'm suggesting that people are allowed to inform children about the risks just as we do with smoking and drinking and allow them to make that decision when they are able to.
Also, (forgive me if I get the jargon wrong here...) isn't the vaping health crisis the article mentions due to sketchy THC vaping solutions that have Vitamin E oil in them? Not Juul's nicotine stuff?
I.e. because THC isn't water-soluble, it has to be suspended/dissolved in some oil-based thing. Lipids + lungs = BAD.
Vitamin E acetate and myclobutanil are the most likely culprits. Myclobutanil is a fungicide that cannabis growers use to prevent mildew. It also turns into cyanide when heated.
Speculation: State governments are leveraging the hysteria to slow a loss in excise tax revenue stemming from the decline in combustible cigarette use.
Yes, the vaping deaths almost certainly are from black market, contaminated THC pods/cartridges.
But why let a few facts get in the way of perfectly good outrage?
Note: I'm not a smoker, but I feel strongly that vaping has the potential to dramatically decrease smoking deaths. More research is needed in lieu of the current media and government-driven hysteria.
Problem is that even though the Juul cartridges are proprietary, that hasn't stopped people from making Juul-compatible off-brand products. There are of course other concerns besides the vaporised oils.
Regulatory crackdown was probably spawned by the deaths caused by bad THC solvents. But while regulators peruse the industry they found that nicotine vapor companies like Juul had plenty of their own misdeeds.
One is THC vaping solutions that are killing people.
The second is that we're currently living through a meteoric rise in nicotine addiction among teenagers. For a very long time, teenage nicotine use was going down, due to declines in smoking rates. Smoking rates still continue to decline, but nicotine vaping rates have gone up and to the right. 1 in 4 high school students are now vaping nicotine. That number is growing by ~20% year over year.
To be succeeded by a former tobacco executive. The takeover of Juul by big tobacco is now complete, and they have someone with strong experience downplaying, denying and obfuscating to weather the storm.
Next up: regulatory capture. Vaping right now is super cheap because of all the options from different companies. So what's a multibillion dollar international conglomerate to do? Well, make the
little guys go away with onerous regulations, of course. It's the American Way™.
They reached out to me on LinkedIn. Don't know why they need software engineers, but I don't think I'm aligned with their mission -- whatever it may be.
Should've at least talked to a recruiter to hear them out, I'd be too curious not to. Years back I'd had a recruiter for one of the world's largest pornographers reach out to me, was very interesting to learn about what they do and how they do it.
I just managed to quit Juul's after a ~5 year binge. It costed me ~60 dollars a week or so and unlike cigarettes where you typically go outside and make a little event out of it, these little guys can be huffed anywhere, so that usually causes you to build a constant huffing habit. Your entire day is constantly revolving around this little device, it terrified me to realize that I needed some external device/chemicals just to feel normal every day.
There is an emerging argument that vaping is less health damaging than smoking and it likely is, however, Nicotine addiction is key to the business model and that will not change.
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ojnabieoot|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lazyguy2|6 years ago|reply
But these big companies can't compete with all the Vape Shops that are insanely popular and are everywhere.
This is why there is just a big hubbub over regulation and the deaths over black market Marijuana cartridges. These massive corporations can afford to deal with things like FDA certification of flavors and such things.
Were as the small companies, that make up the bulk of the vape market, cannot. So they will get pushed out of the market and 'big tobacco' will be the only ones that are allowed to sell in the USA. They really don't care if they have bad names and are used as targets by the regulators when they are going to be the only ones allowed to sell to the public.
Governments are going along with this because tobacco is a massive tax base. They can't regulate small business and internet sales in the same manner they can regulate and tax a small number of massive corporations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
According to 'Lung Cancer Fact Sheet' there was a estimated 154,000 Americans that would of died to lung cancer in 2018. Tobacco smoking contributes to all types of cancer.
This is why Vaping, which should cut these lung cancer rates by over 95%, is one of the most important public health break-throughs in recent memory.
If allowed to continue to exist in the way it is now it should do more to cut down on cancer deaths then billions of dollars in medical research spent in the past 20 years.
People have found that vaping is massively more effective at helping them to quit smoking compared to patches, gum, or any other medical-grade nicotine delivery method. It's extremely cheap, it's effective, and it's safe and has none of the side effects associated with any other type of drug being sold by doctors to help people quit.
And yet you have politicians now scrambling all over each other to flush this miracle down the toilet to protect their tax revenue and help out 'Big Tobacco'.
And when you look close at the facts behind 'vaping deaths' it's pretty obvious that these are related to drug prohibition more then anything else. These are deaths that are massively contributed to by regulation. If people bought those cartridges from gas stations or vape shops they would still be alive, but they couldn't because they were illegal in their states.
[+] [-] aivisol|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ceejayoz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gimmeThaBeet|6 years ago|reply
There's part of me that feels like it's a health corollary to the Jevons Paradox, if you make nicotine delivery potentially less damaging, it would stand to follow you lower the risk barrier and might end up with more nicotine users than you started with.
I'm def not in high school anymore, and maybe for that reason, the messaging I've personally seen from Juul does is entirely different. Literally the only stuff I've seen from Juul in the wild has been,
* "If you weren't already smoking, don't use Juul" * "we support any effort to raise the minimum age of purchasing nicotine products to 21 (T21 laws)"
I certainly wouldn't be taken aback if this were just one face of a many-faced beast, and with the other hand they were trying to cultivate a new generation of customers.
But it's with a sort of bemused annoyance that the common refrain I've heard from activists and public policy folks ends up converging at "Juul should have never existed." The cynic in me thinks it wonderful if all our problems had the decency to never exist. It just seems aggravating of all issues, the wheels of the machine politic turn so freely for flavored e-cigarettes.
[+] [-] dcolkitt|6 years ago|reply
Here's the facts. Smoking is bad because smoldering organic compounds are very damaging. It doesn't matter what is being burned, all smoke is bad in roughly equal proportion to the volume of smoke being inhaled. It's why sitting by a wood-burning fireplace does as much damage as a pack of cigarettes.
(As an aside, we generally don't see the same health problems with cannabis smokers as we do with tobacco smokers. That's primarily because cannabis smokers consume significantly less volume than tobacco smokers. A pack-a-day smoker is smoldering 140 grams of dried organic material. A very heavy cannabis user might go through 7 grams of high-THC weed per week.)
So the fact is we don't really know much about the long-term health consequences of vaping. It simply hasn't been widespread for long enough for us to gather any large-scale epidemiological data. It's possible it may be very harmful. It's also possible that it may be basically harmless.
But the fact that smoking is unhealthy tells us nothing about vaping. There are no smoldering organic compounds involved in vaping. Therefore if it is unhealthy it would be because of a totally separate mechanism. In general there are very very few human activities that are as unhealthy as smoking. Heavy smoking literally quadruples all cause mortality.
There are many many activities that push humans' physiological baseline. High-altitude living, exotic or restricted diets, mega-doses of vitamins, scuba diving, high salt consumption, high-dose hallucinogens, keeping a nocturnal schedule, heavy caffeine consumption, drinking too much or too little water, being a radiation worker, artificial sweeteners, heavy manual labor, tons and tons of synthesized dyes and chemicals. Most of them are basically harmless, and none of them have anywhere near the health impact of smoking.
It would quite unexpected if vaping just coincidentally happened to be one of the few human activities that had a smoking-magnitude effect. Is it possible? Sure. Is it likely? Not at all.
As for nicotine consumption, the balance of the evidence is that it's very slightly unhealthy at worse, and potentially beneficial for neurological health.[1]
[1]https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine
[+] [-] bhouston|6 years ago|reply
But kids adopting flavored ecigs and beginning smoking is horrible.
So we need to limit ecigs to the first use case and minimize the second otherwise ecigs/vaping could be an overall net negative.
So I do strongly favor no advertising at all and no flavors or colors except mentol or something else which appeals to existing smokers.
[+] [-] stronglikedan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hawkedit|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] least|6 years ago|reply
Existing smokers like the different flavors as well and it's definitely one of the appeals it has over smoking cigarettes.
EDIT: I'd like to make the point that I'm not a proponent of children making their own decisions as a child. We've already accepted as a society (generally) that children do not have the same agency as adults. I'm suggesting that people are allowed to inform children about the risks just as we do with smoking and drinking and allow them to make that decision when they are able to.
[+] [-] mfoy_|6 years ago|reply
I.e. because THC isn't water-soluble, it has to be suspended/dissolved in some oil-based thing. Lipids + lungs = BAD.
[+] [-] arzt|6 years ago|reply
Speculation: State governments are leveraging the hysteria to slow a loss in excise tax revenue stemming from the decline in combustible cigarette use.
[+] [-] jnbiche|6 years ago|reply
But why let a few facts get in the way of perfectly good outrage?
Note: I'm not a smoker, but I feel strongly that vaping has the potential to dramatically decrease smoking deaths. More research is needed in lieu of the current media and government-driven hysteria.
[+] [-] grenoire|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyldfire|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] situational87|6 years ago|reply
Maybe just in counterfeit knockoffs, maybe not. It's unclear.
[+] [-] vkou|6 years ago|reply
One is THC vaping solutions that are killing people.
The second is that we're currently living through a meteoric rise in nicotine addiction among teenagers. For a very long time, teenage nicotine use was going down, due to declines in smoking rates. Smoking rates still continue to decline, but nicotine vaping rates have gone up and to the right. 1 in 4 high school students are now vaping nicotine. That number is growing by ~20% year over year.
This is a public health crisis.
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