Juul Ignored Evidence Its Electronic Cigarette Was Hooking Teens

Source from:  Irish Examiner 11/11/2019

Executives knew young people were flocking to its breakthrough e-cigarette shortly after it went on sale in 2015 with its potent nicotine blend, writes Chris Kirkham.

The San Francisco startup that invented the groundbreaking Juul e-cigarette had a central goal during its development: captivating users with the first hit.

The company had concluded that consumers had largely rejected earlier e-cigarettes, former employees told Reuters, because the devices either failed to deliver enough nicotine or delivered it with a harsh taste.

Developers of the Juul tackled both problems with a strategy they found scouring old tobacco-company research and patents: adding organic acids to nicotine, which allowed for a unique combination of smooth taste and a potent dose.

Employees tested new liquid-nicotine formulations on themselves or on strangers taking smoke breaks on the street. Sometimes, the mix packed too much punch — enough nicotine to make some testers’ hands shake or send them to the bathroom to vomit, a former company manager told Reuters.

In the end, it worked. The formula delivered nicotine to the bloodstream so efficiently, in fact, that the company’s engineers explored features to stop users from ingesting too much of the drug, too quickly.

Juul’s founders applied for a patent in 2014 that described methods for alerting the user or disabling the device when the dose of a drug such as nicotine exceeds a certain threshold.

One idea was to shut down the device for a half-hour or more after a certain number of puffs, said Chenyue Xing, a former Juul scientist who helped patent its liquid-nicotine formula. The concern stemmed in part from the fact that a Juul — unlike a cigarette — never burns out, Xing said in an interview.

“You hope that they get what they want, and they stop,” she said. “We didn’t want to introduce a new product with a stronger addictive power.”

The company never produced an e-cigarette that limited nicotine intake. Xing was not directly involved in the engineering of the device and said she didn’t know why the firm did not adopt a dosage-control feature.

Juul Labs Inc is now the central player in a broader controversy sweeping the US over the safety of its products along with those of a wave of high-nicotine imitators. The rise of Juul sales tracks closely with an epidemic of teenage nicotine use that has brought a hail of criticism and regulatory scrutiny on the company.

US congressional investigators, state attorneys general and health advocates have so far focused on whether Juul targetted young people through its marketing and the dessert-like flavours of some Juul nicotine liquids, such as creme brulee or mango.

But a Reuters investigation has found that, from the company’s earliest days, insiders discussed and debated concerns over more fundamental attributes of the product: its potency and addictiveness.

The breakthrough “nicotine salts” formula that made the Juul e-cigarette so addictive — and ignited the company’s explosive market-share growth made Juul especially attractive to teenagers and other new users who otherwise would never have smoked cigarettes, according to interviews with more than a dozen tobacco researchers, paediatricians, and a Reuters review of Juul patents and independent research on nicotine chemistry.

The device delivers the drug more efficiently than a cigarette, according to emerging academic research into Juul’s formula and the company’s own documents. In written answers to questions from Reuters, Juul said it never intended to attract underage users.

The company acknowledged it needed to “earn back the trust of regulators, policymakers, key stakeholders and society at large” in light of a surge in youth vaping to “unacceptable” levels.  Enditem