JUUL: 2018’s hottest back-to-school supply

Kids love JUUL. The sleek e-cigarette has won users over with its no-frills design, discreet size, and—perhaps—a bigger dose of nicotine than they knew they were getting. The problem is, JUUL may be getting too popular for its own good. It’s hard to overstate JUUL’s ubiquity in the vaping world. In August, the company captured [nearly three-quarters]( of the US e-cigarette market, leaving its competitors coughing in a cloud of its berry-scented dust. Just three years after its introduction, JUUL has achieved a linguistic status typically reserved for a select few tech giants, like Google and Xerox: when people use its product, they’re neither smoking nor vaping—they’re JUULing. And they did it without a massive marketing spend, instead rolling out a social-media campaign as well-targeted as its main ingredient. Meanwhile, media coverage has fixated on the [JUULing craze]( among wealthy high school students. (The starter kit is $50.) Although [JUUL’s founders]( say they invented their product as an alternative for smokers—they [met on a smoke break]( as design students at Stanford—a slew of studies and [lawsuits]( suggest JUUL might be helping a new generation of users get addicted to nicotine. Let’s take a deep breath and a deep look. 🐦 [Tweet this!]( 🌐 [View this email on the web]( [Quartz Obsession] JUUL September 04, 2018 JUULin’ in the boys’ room --------------------------------------------------------------- Kids love JUUL. The sleek e-cigarette has won users over with its no-frills design, discreet size, and—perhaps—a bigger dose of nicotine than they knew they were getting. The problem is, JUUL may be getting too popular for its own good. It’s hard to overstate JUUL’s ubiquity in the vaping world. In August, the company captured [nearly three-quarters]( of the US e-cigarette market, leaving its competitors coughing in a cloud of its berry-scented dust. Just three years after its introduction, JUUL has achieved a linguistic status typically reserved for a select few tech giants, like Google and Xerox: when people use its product, they’re neither smoking nor vaping—they’re JUULing. And they did it without a massive marketing spend, instead rolling out a social-media campaign as well-targeted as its main ingredient. Meanwhile, media coverage has fixated on the [JUULing craze]( among wealthy high school students. (The starter kit is $50.) Although [JUUL’s founders]( say they invented their product as an alternative for smokers—they [met on a smoke break]( as design students at Stanford—a slew of studies and [lawsuits]( suggest JUUL might be helping a new generation of users get addicted to nicotine. Let’s take a deep breath and a deep look. 🐦 [Tweet this!]( 🌐 [View this email on the web]( Head rush JUUL hits harder --------------------------------------------------------------- JUUL doesn’t just look different from most other e-cigarettes. It hits differently, too. Most vapes deliver “freebase” nicotine, a process that cigarette-makers have used for decades to make it more powerful and thus more addictive. But it’s also harsh, as anyone who’s smoked a cigarette is familiar with. JUUL’s breakthrough is its nicotine-salt formula, which allows for [high concentrations of nicotine without the harshness](. The result is something that delivers a lot of nicotine fast without the irritation. That makes it appealing to smokers, and since JUUL is allegedly better than smoking it’s hopefully a safer substitute. The bad news is that the barrier to JUUL is lower than cigarettes—think about the people who take a draw on a cig, think it tastes awful, and stop—so it’s also more appealing for people who aren’t yet addicted to nicotine. by the digits [783%:]( Rise in JUUL sales in the year before June 16, 2018 [23%:]( Drop in Philip Morris stock this year [$15 billion:]( JUUL’s valuation, as it seeks to raise another $1.2 billion in capital [200:]( Estimated puffs in a JUUL pod, supposedly equivalent to a pack of cigarettes [2.1 million:]( Estimated number of high school and middle school students who smoked e-cigarettes in 2017 [600:]( Number of #2 pencils you could buy for the price of a JUUL starter kit [63%]( Proportion of JUUL users who don’t realize that the product always contains nicotine [$30 million:]( Amount of money JUUL has pledged to help curb underage vaping brief history The men who invented vaping --------------------------------------------------------------- The first vapers may have been people in the court of Emperor Akbar of the Mughal Empire (now India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh). The royal physicians, trying to forge a safer way of smoking, [invented the hookah]( like vapers, they flavored the tobacco, too. But it didn’t help, and actually [made it worse](. The first modern e-cigarette was filed as a patent by Herbert A. Gilbert in 1963. It never made it to production, and it probably wouldn’t have worked, since it [wasn’t intended to have nicotine and didn’t produce vapor](. Instead it would have produced “tobacco-flavored air,” which as Gilbert [admitted]( years later, would not have sufficed. But he did get a lot right: the general look and feel, a heating element, and a flavor pod. Vaping came on the scene about 15 years later, a eureka moment for Phil Ray, a former NASA engineer and a driving force in the [creation of the microprocessor](. Like the creators of JUUL, Ray was a smoker and wanted a better alternative, so he approached his doctor, Norman Jacobson, with the idea of inhaling nicotine vapor. They got that part right, but there was no heating element—users sucked on a cigarette-shaped tube filled with filter paper soaked in nicotine. The nicotine didn’t last long on the shelf, though, and users got the hiccups. They did, however, coin the term [“vaping.”]( The first commercially viable e-cigarette was the invention of Hon Lik, a Chinese pharmacist, [three-packs-a-day smoker,]( and son of a lung cancer victim. After falling asleep with his nicotine patch on and [having the intense dreams that follow]( Hon started thinking about alternatives, starting with a device that atomized the nicotine with ultrasound, but “the droplets formed were too big to resemble tobacco smoke.” What worked was a combination of what had come before: liquid nicotine turned into vapor with a heating element. Quotable “Don’t get me wrong the bathrooms smell a lot nicer now so it’s a plus. Except when you see a Congo line [sic] of people walking to the office.” —[post from a high school redditor]( on the ubiquity of on-campus JUULing. Explain it to me like I’m 5! So how bad is it, doctor? --------------------------------------------------------------- One of the concerns of vaping is that we simply [don’t know]( the effects of inhaling vaporized nicotine. E-cigarettes have only been around 15 years, while the link between smoking and cancer has been established for almost 70 years. The good news is that vaping tobacco is [almost certainly not worse]( than smoking it, because most of the carcinogens in cigarettes come from the tar. The bad news? E-cigarettes cause an increase in heart rate and blood pressure, so there’s concern that the long-term effects of nicotine from vaping [could be the same]( as smoking even i[f the long-term studies don’t exist yet](. Concerns have been raised about [vape flavors]( as well. And definitely [keep the highly concentrated e-liquids away from kids](. timeline [1950:]( Studies from five separate British and American research teams conclude that there’s a link between smoking and cancer. [1964:]( On the basis of 7,000 published articles, the US Surgeon General releases a report drawing a causal link between smoking and lung cancer and chronic bronchitis. [1970:]( The US bans cigarette advertisements from radio and TV. [1984:]( The US Food and Drug Administration approves nicotine gum as the first drug meant to help users quit smoking. [1990:]( US bans smoking on nearly all domestic flights. [2003:]( World Health Assembly adopts the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, establishing international guidelines for curbing tobacco use. [2004:]( Ruyan (“like smoke”) starts selling e-cigarettes in China. [2006-2007:]( E-cigarettes go on sale in Europe and the United States. [2015:]( JUUL begins marketing itself using some of the same tactics as traditional tobacco companies. history repeats E-cigarettes use Big Tobacco’s banned tactics --------------------------------------------------------------- In its heyday, Big Tobacco became notorious for designing ads and products to appeal to kids. Eventually, the US government cracked down. Camel cigarettes yanked its Joe Camel ad campaign in 1997 under pressure from the Federal Trade Commission. And in 2009, the Food and Drug Administration [banned kid-friendly cigarette flavors]( like Camel’s Twista Lime and Warm Winter Toffee. But these restrictions don’t extend to e-cigarettes like JUUL, which comes in flavors like mango, fruit medley, and crème brûlée. Last year, a team led by the University of Kansas’s Yvonnes Chen used an fMRI to [study adolescents’ brains]( while they watched ads for e-cigarettes and other products. The researchers found that, compared with other advertisements, e-cigarette ads caused higher levels of activity in the reward centers of kids’ brains. After seeing the ads, the adolescents reported an increased desire to smoke. take me down this 🐰 hole! 💨GQ explains [how the internet birthed a young vape god](. 💨The New Yorker goes deep on [the promise of vaping and the rise of JUUL](. 💨New York teens explain to The Cut [how they made Juul cool](. watch this! Lord of the vape rings --------------------------------------------------------------- The internet is awash in videos and gifs of vape tricks—delicate figures exhaled by expert vapers—and their proliferation on social media has contributed to vaping’s rise and spread. See this performer’s skills bring judges to their feet in a 2016 audition for France’s Got Talent. This one weird trick! Take it from the science mag Discover: [“Vaping Next to a Truck Is a Lesson in Aerodynamics”]( how big rigs create a partial vacuum as they pass. Poll Do you even vape? [Click here to vote]( Never in my lifeI have, but I don’t do it regularlyI blow clouds everyday 💬Let's talk! 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