AMERICAN CHRONICLES
`
`THE PROMISE OF VAPING AND THE RISE OF
`JUUL
`
`Teens have taken a technology that was supposed to help grownups stop smoking and invented a new
`kind ofbad habit, molded in their own image.
`
`By Jia Tolentino
`
`May 7, 2018
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`Ci Savethis story
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`[| Listen to this story
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`f I get addicted to vaping, I thought, in March,I will always rememberthis
`Texas strip mall. 1 was walking out of a store called Smoke-N-Chill Novelties,
`in Southwest Austin, holding a receipt for $62.95 and twocrisp, white shrink-
`wrapped boxes. I got into the driver’s seat of a rental car and began to open them.
`From one I extracted a Juul: a slim black vaporizer about half the width and
`weight of a Bic lighter, with rounded edges and a gently burnishedfinish.(It looks
`like a flash drive, everyone always points out. You can recharge it by plugging it
`into your computer.) From the other I extracted a thumbnail-size cartridge called
`a pod,filled with juice containing a cigarette pack’s worth ofnicotine. The juice in
`my pod was cucumber-flavored. This was an odd choice, I waslater told; ofJuul’s
`eight flavors, people tend to prefer mango, or mint. I inserted the pod into the
`Juul, andalittle light on the device glowed green. I took a sharp experimental
`inhalation and nearly jumped.It felt as if a tiny ghost had rushed outofthe
`vaporizer and slapped meon the back of mythroat.
`
`I took another hit, and another. Each one was a white spike of nothing: a pop, a
`flavored coolness, as if the idea of a cucumberhadjust vanished inside my mouth.
`AsI pulled out of the parking lot, my scalp tingled. To Juul (the brand has become
`a verb) is to inhale nicotine free from the seductively disgusting accoutrements of
`a cigarette: the tar, the carbon monoxide, the garbage mouth, the smell. It’s an
`uncanny simulacrum of smoking. An analyst at Wells Fargo projects that this year
`the American vaporizer marketwill grow to five and a half billion dollars, an
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`increase of more than twenty-five per cent from 2017. In the latest data, sixty per
`cent of that market belongs to Juul.
`
`That’s just a fraction of what old-fashioned smoking brings in—the U.S.cigarette
`market is worth a hundred and twenty billion dollars. But it’s a fast rise after a
`long wait: inventors have been attempting to develop a successful electronic
`cigarette since the nineteen-sixties. Traditional cigarettes pair nicotine—which,
`contrary to commonbelief, does not cause cancer—with an arsenal of carcinogenic
`substances. As the harm-reduction pioneer Michael Russell said, in 1976, “People
`smoke for the nicotine, but they die from thetar.” And so people keep looking for
`healthier waysto deliver a fix. Philip Morris and R. J. Reynolds have reportedly
`invested billions in creating so-called heat-not-burn products, which generate
`smoke from tobacco at lower temperatures than cigarettes do—butearly versions
`of these, released in the eighties, flopped. More recent efforts are still awaiting
`ED.A.review.
`
`In 2003, a Chinese pharmacist named Hon Likpatented the first version of
`today’s standard e-cigarette: a device that vaporizesliquid nicotine through a
`heating element. (Imagine a handheld humidifier that’s hot and full ofnicotine.)
`The following year, two product-design grad students at Stanford, Adam Bowen
`and James Monsees, decided that they could disrupt Big Tobacco: they created a
`startup called Ploom, which launched formally, in San Francisco, three yearslater.
`In 2012, they came out with the Pax, a vaporizer that resembled, as Inc. putit, “a
`stubby iPhone.” You could load it with weed as well as with loose-leaf tobacco.
`(They later sold the Ploom brand and oneof their vaporizerlines to a Japanese
`outfit and became Pax Labs.)
`
`Soon afterward, they began work on the Juul, choosing a name that evoked both a
`precious stone and the amountof energy required to produce one watt of power
`for one second. TheJuul, they decided, would be a nicotine-only device, squarely
`targeted at the roughly onebillion cigarette smokers in the world. (Both Bowen
`and Monsees are former smokers who switched to vaping with their own early
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`prototypes.) The e-cigarette market was growing, and becomingless independent:
`a brandcalled blu, founded in 2009, was acquired by the Lorillard Tobacco
`Company, in 2012; R. J. Reynolds launched Vuse in 2013. (Reynolds subsequently
`bought Lorillard and sold blu to the British multinational Imperial Brands.) But
`the more advanced vapes were either unattractively large or required users to
`monitor finicky temperature settings, coils, and wicks. Bowen and Monsees gave
`each Juul its own circuit board and firmware, removing the need for technical
`know-how andinsuring better control, and managedtofit it all into a small
`device. After a series of focus groups with longtime smokers, they developed a
`flavor strategy: a tobacco profile, a mintprofile, a fruit profile, a dessert profile. For
`the design, they avoided the roundness ofa cigarette, and the glowing tip, because
`they wanted people who used the Juulto feel as if they were doing something new.
`
`Their biggest breakthrough was chemical. Since the sixties, cigarette companies,
`starting with Philip Morris, have freebased nicotine using ammonia, which
`liberates the nicotine so that it can be speedily absorbed into the lungs and the
`brain. As one addiction expert has said, “The modern cigarette does to nicotine
`what crack does to cocaine.” Pax Labs discovered that by adding benzoic acid to
`nicotine salts, which occur naturally in tobacco, they could mimic a cigarette’s
`rapid nicotine delivery.
`
`Nicotine is both a stimulant and a relaxant: it peps you up when you'retired,andif
`you're anxious it calms you down.Historically, people have smoked tobacco as
`soon as they comeinto contact with it—Native Americans took it up thousands of
`years ago, the English got started in the sixteenth century—with anti-tobacco
`campaigns often following closely behind. King JamesI’s 1604 treatise “A
`Counterblaste to Tobacco”called tobacco a “filthie noveltie” that was “hatefull to
`
`the Nose” and “harmefull to the braine.”
`
`He wasn't wrong:the nicotine in tobacco bindsto receptors in multiple regions of
`the brain, raising dopaminelevels and mimicking a key neurotransmitter that
`affects focus and arousal. This is so pleasing—andlife so arduous—thatnearly
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`forty million Americans currently smoke, despite knowing that it may give them
`lung cancer. (Before the cigarette-rolling machine was invented,in thelate
`nineteenth century, lung cancer wasa rare disease.) ‘The youngerthe brain, the
`moreeasily its reward circuits can be manipulated: the vast majority of adult
`smokers began before age eighteen.
`
`This is at least partly why parents are freaking out about the Juul, which has
`becomea ubiquitous presence at high schools in America’s more affluent Zip
`Codes—precisely those places where, in recent decades, smoking has declined the
`most. (The vaporizersretail for $34.99, and a four-pack of pods costs $15.99. In
`February, at a press conference after the Parkland shooting, a studentsaid that he
`no longer thought of Marjory Stoneman Douglasas “just a school ofentitled
`children and those whoJuul.”) Each week brings dozensof local news stories
`sounding the samealarm: innocent, vulnerable, sneaky American teen-agers are
`getting hooked. High schools are holding informational sessions about vaping,
`sending letters home to parents, investing in vape detectors. One schooldistrict in
`Pennsylvania bannedflash drives. “We are seeing the vaping and the ‘JJuuling’
`across the board,” a substance-abuse counsellor in Arlington, Virginia, told a local
`radio station, surmising that vapes might contain “cocaine liquid.”(It is possible,
`though difficult, to crack open a Juul pod and fill it with your ownliquid. This
`would be a complicated and perhaps unprecedented way to do cocaine.) An
`assistant principal in North Dakota warned the Grand Forks Herald about the
`dangers of e-cigarette liquid, which he had inadvertently touched after
`confiscating a bottle that he found in a student’s backpack. Soon afterward, he
`began to feel nauseated and “real emotional,” he said.
`
`Asfears about youth Juuling have intensified, calls for a government crackdown
`have increased. The F.D.A.did not regulate e-cigarettes as tobacco products until
`2016. (Previously, it attempted to regulate them as “drug-delivery devices,” but
`that approach was struck downin court.) Now e-cigarette companies must submit
`a premarket tobacco application, or P.M.T.A., in order to keep their products on
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`the market. (The process is complex and expensive, and will probably put smaller
`independent vape companiesout of business.) The deadline for this application
`was plannedfor this year, then pushed back to 2022. In March, the American
`Heart Association, the American Lung Association, and several other groups sued
`the F.D.A., arguing that the delay needlessly exposes consumersto “lethal and
`addictive” substances. In April, eleven senators, including Chuck Schumer and
`Elizabeth Warren, sent anopen letter to Juul Labs—which was spun off from Pax
`last June—asserting that Juul’s products are “putting an entire new generation of
`children at risk of nicotine addiction and other health consequences.”
`
`Cigarette smokingisstill the No. 1 cause of preventable death in this country,
`killing nearly five hundred thousand people each year. (According to somestudies,
`more than half of longtime smokers will die from smoking-related complications.)
`It’s incredibly hard to stop smoking; people spendlifetimes trying. Around
`seventy per cent of American smokers say that they wantto quit, and for many of
`them e-cigarettes have been a godsend. But, according to a 2017 study by the
`C.D.C., aboutfifty per cent more high schoolers and middle schoolers vape than
`smoke. Young people have taken a technology that was supposed to help
`grownupsstop smoking and invented a new kind of bad habit, one that they have
`molded in their own image. The potential public-health benefit of the e-cigarette
`is being eclipsed by the unsettling prospect of a generation of children who may
`really love to vape.
`
`f you're overforty, your idea of smoking waslikely shaped by Madison Avenue
`
`I and Hollywood: the strong-jawed cowboylighting a Marlboro, Lauren Bacall
`
`asking for a match. Juul has been defined by Instagram and Snapchat. The
`company’s official Instagram account, @juulvapor, is age-appropriate andfairly
`boring—ithas an aesthetic reminiscent of Real Simple, and forty-four thousand
`followers. But viral, teen-centric Juul fan accounts like @doit4juul (a hundred and
`ten thousandfollowers) are populated with a different sort of imagery: a
`bodybuilder Juuling in a tank top that says “Real Men Eat Ass”; a baby (labelled
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`“me”) being shoved into a birthday cake (“the Juul”) by her mom (“mynicotine
`addiction”); a topless college student who has a Juul in her mouth and is wearing a
`pink hat that says “Daddy.” Teen Juul iconographyradiates a dirtbag silliness.
`Vapes are meme-ready, funny in a way that cigarettes never were: the black-and-
`white photograph ofJames Dean smokingin shirtsleeves has been replaced with
`paparazzi snaps of Ben Affleck ripping an e-cig in his car. In one popular video, a
`girl tries to Juul with four corn dogs in her mouth. In another,teens at a party
`suck onaflash drive that they’ve mistaken for a Juul. “I know oneofthe girls in
`that video!” a high-school senior from Maryland told me. “It was a Auge deal at my
`school.”
`
`Juuling and scrolling through Instagram offerstrikingly similar forms of
`contemporarypleasure. Both provide stimulus when you'retired and fidgety, and
`both tend to become mindless tics that fit neatly into rapidly diminishing
`amounts offree time. (You can take two Juul hits and double-tap a bunchofpics
`in about ten seconds. You needaninefficient five minutes to burn a paper tube of
`tar and leaves into ash.) The omnipresence ofJuul on social media has
`undoubtedly made kids overestimate the extent of teen Juuling—young people
`tend to think that their peers drink, smoke, and hook up more than theyactually
`do. Andit’s all beyond regulation: the F.D.A. can control the behavior of
`companies advertising nicotine for profit, but it can do nothing about teens
`advertising nicotine to one anotherforfree.
`
`A high-school sophomore named Kate, from Houston,told me that the Juulers
`she knows have their own cars to vape in and cash to spare. You have to be
`twenty-one to shop at Juul’s online store, and the company requires a match
`between public records, credit-card information, and governmentI.D. (The site
`turns more than a quarter of would-be purchasers away, inadvertently filtering out
`many adults who have recently moved.) But kids can buy Juuls in bulk on eBay
`and Alibaba with prepaid debit cards anda little creativity. Juul has a team devoted
`to taking downsuchlistings, but the companysays thatit’s like “playing Whac-a-
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`Mole.” “Andif you deal Juul you can make a Jot of money,” Kate said. She
`described multiple levels and types ofJuul dealers at her school: some sold pods,
`somesold devices, some would do bootlegrefills if you wanted a different flavor or
`THCoil instead. (‘The resale markup is partly what makes Juuling an expensive
`habit for teens. Juul is not subject to cigarette taxes, though, so in places where
`they’re high—New York, New England, Chicago—Juuling can otherwise be
`cheaper than smoking.)
`I talked to a sixteen-year-old girl in Westchester County, whom PII call Leslie, to
`keep her from narcing on her classmates. Juuls caught on at her schoollast
`summer, she said. Upperclassmen bought them, underclassmentried them at
`parties, and suddenly people were Juuling in the cafeteria, charging Juuls on their
`laptops, and filling their Instagram and Snapchat feeds with Juuling videos and
`ciFs. “Dealers will announce on Snapchat that they've bought a hundred of them,
`and they’ll write the price, the date, and the meeting place for kids to show up
`with cash,” Leslie said. She described her classmates Juuling in locker rooms, and
`on the trail behind the school—where people also drink and smoke weed—andin
`the quad,if they’re ballsy. “But the biggest spots are the bathrooms,”shesaid.
`“There are so many people Juuling sometimesthatall the varieties offlavors just
`get morphedinto one big vape. Some daysI’m just, like, why do you need to do
`this at 11 a.m.?”
`
`The high-schoolstudents I talked to took a level of ambient stress for granted, as
`if it were like the iPhone—a non-negotiable condition of everydaylife. Did people
`Juul because they were anxious? Ofcourse, they said, as though I'd asked whether
`they ate when they were hungry. Leslie had also noticed “a weird paradox,”she
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`said. “You're expected to Juul, but you're expected to not dependonit. If youre
`cool, then you Juul with other people, and you post aboutit, so everyonewill see
`that you're social and ironic and funny. But, if you’re addicted, you go off by
`yourself and Juul because you need it, and everyone knows.”Likeall the teen-agers
`I talked to, she thought of the Juul as something made for people like her. “?’m
`always surprised when I see an adult with a Juul,” she said. “It’s sort of like seeing
`my grandmawith an Alexa.”
`
`«CL et’s be clear,”JonathanWinickoff, the former chair ofthe American
`
`Academyof Pediatrics Tobacco Consortium, whichis trying to end youth
`smoking, told me in March. “Juul is already a massive public-health disaster—and
`without dramatic actionit’s going to get much, much, much worse.”
`
`Winickoff is a pediatrician at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor at
`Harvard Medical School. A few weeks after we spoke, the American Academyof
`Pediatrics joined the American Lung Association and others in their lawsuit
`against the F.D.A. “If you were to design your ideal nicotine-delivery device to
`addict large numbers of United States kids, you'd invent Juul,” Winickoff said.“It’s
`absolutely unconscionable. The earlier these companies introduce the product to
`the developing brain, the better the chance they havea lifelong user.”
`
`Winickoff believes that the vape industry is co-opting the national wellness trend
`—“when,in fact, vaping can cause somethingcalled bronchiolitis obliterans, or
`popcorn lung,” he said. Popcorn lung has been linked to diacetyl, an organic
`compoundthat some companiesuse in their e-liquid, and that has been detected
`as a by-product of e-cigarette vapor. But diacetyl has also been detected in
`cigarette smoke, at a level hundreds of times greater, and no feasible amount of
`smoking has been found to cause popcorn lung.(Juul does not use diacetylinits
`liquid, and, in tests, the company has found no measurable amounts of diacetyl in
`the vapor emitted by its devices.)
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`Winickoff is passionate on the subject, and he grew more fervent as we spoke. At
`one point, he likened e-cigarettes to “bioterrorism.” He predicted that, eventually,
`a state’s attorney general would sue Juul “for willfully designing and pushing a
`product that will cause harm to the children of the United States.” He added,“It’s
`extremely hard, once someoneis addicted to nicotine, to get them off it. As a
`clinician, you knowthat their brain has changed,that it will always be nicotine-
`hungry. You feel that you havelost that child.”
`
`But e-cigarettes are definitively safer than cigarettes, aren't they? There are
`typically around six hundredingredients in cigarettes. Juul’s e-cigarette liquid
`contains only five: glycerol, propylene glycol, nicotine, benzoic acid, and food-
`grade flavoring. Glycerol is a sweet liquid that has been usedin antifreeze, giving
`rise to the urban legend that e-cigarettes contain antifreeze. But it is also used in
`toothpaste. Propylene glycol is used in asthma nebulizers. Benzoic acid is a
`commonfoodpreservative.
`
`“If you compare the Juul to a thing that kills one out of every two users, of course
`it’s safer,” Winickoff said. “Andit’s not just Juul,” he went on. He noted some of
`the by-products of other e-cigarette vapor, including formaldehyde andtrace
`metals. “There are hundredsof different companies. There’s a significant and
`growing market for bogus, pirated versions of each product.” Some companiessell
`cheaper, Juul-compatible podsin flavorslike blueberry, watermelon, and
`“strawberry milk.” Vaping, Winickoff said, was like smoking marijuana: “You don't
`know what the drug might be laced with.”
`
`I had been thinking about the weed comparison. Nicotine is far more addictive
`than THC,andits use pattern is more intrusive: stoners don't get overpowering
`physical cravings to hide in airplane bathroomsandhit a bong. But smoking
`marijuana produces carcinogens—tar, carbon monoxide, ammonia—that vaping
`nicotine does not, and, as a drug, marijuana has a much moreintense psychoactive
`effect than nicotine. Even so, weed is now legal for recreational use in tenstates
`and in Washington, D.C. In April, Chuck Schumerintroducedlegislation to
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`decriminalize marijuana at the federal level. It’s possible to imagine a future in
`which nicotine would be viewed as something akin to marijuana—notnecessarily
`great for you, but not catastrophic,either.
`
`I admitted to Winickoff that I was probably endangering my lungs as a weed
`smoker. He gamely pointed out that I could look into ingested forms of marijuana,
`and noted that my brain was in a much morestable place than it had been when I
`
`was twenty-one.
`
`“Well, maybe,” I said. “I’ve been Juuling a little for this piece.”
`
`Winickoff gasped. “Jia, you can’t!”
`
`ver Easter weekend,I visited my alma mater, the University of Virginia,
`
`O established bythe Founding Father and tobacco farmerThomasJefferson.
`
`Smokingwasstill permitted in restaurants when I was an undergrad in
`Charlottesville, and that was the main reason I started smoking:I waitedtables,
`and it felt good to have a couple of cigarettes when myshift was over, while I was
`sitting at the bar and having myfree beer. (I quit smokingfive yearsafter I
`graduated.) Walking across campus, I noticed that the spots where smokers used
`to congregate—the sidewalk on the main drag, the benches outside the library—
`were vacant. I had cometo the school to speak on a panel aboutcareers in
`journalism. Whenthe paneldiscussion ended,a visiting high-school student
`introducedherself, and I told her about the story I was working on. “Smokingis
`gross,” she said. “Juuling is really what’s up.”
`
`Saying the word “Juul” in front of a group of young people with spending money
`is like dropping an everything bagelinto a flock of pigeons in a public park. A
`sophomore, overhearing our conversation, showed mehis Juul: it had “Fuck Off”
`scratched into one side and “Work Harder” on the other. He was from Colorado,
`where in the summer, hesaid, you can drive around Juuling with your windows
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`downandgirls in passing cars will go, “Wooo!! Juul!!” The Juulis the “devil’s
`stick,” he said. “I hit it from the moment I wake up to the momentI can't go to
`sleep, and keep Juuling.” But at least he was better off than his friend, he said, who
`had spent $999.46 on podsthis year.
`
`While high-school Juuling has promptedlocal-news horrorstories, college Juuling
`has inspired work in a different genre: the satirical essay. In January, a junior at
`Cornell named Jason Jeong published a newspaper columncalled “The Juul
`Manifesto.” (“A spectre is haunting Cornell—the spectre of the Juul.”) He argued
`that the Juul represents his generation's “tech-savvy ingenuity when it comesto
`making bad decisions.” Over the phone, Jason, who grew up in California, told me
`that hefirst tried Juul in 2016. “Someonepulls one out at a party, and naturally the
`question is ‘Can I try it?,’ and then after ‘Can I try it?’ five or six times you end up
`buying your own, and, soon enough, you're breathing in more Juul than air.”
`
`At Cornell, Jason told me, people Juuled in bathroomsand classrooms, in “every
`nook and cranny of this campus.” In the fall, he'd started a group text, with a few
`friends, to codrdinate pod runs. Hecalled the group Juuluminati, and it has since
`grownto three hundred and twenty-four members. Jason was Juuling while he
`talked to me, on the third floor of an academic building. “I know for a fact that
`there are two or three of my goodfriends sitting on the first floor of this building
`eating ham sandwichesandjust Juuling away,”hesaid.
`Jason believes that the Juul craze is fundamentally ironic.“It’s young people doing
`somethingterrible for them that’s supposed to be healthy,” he said. He compared
`the infatuation with Juul to the millennial love of the restaurateur and T'V host
`Guy Fieri—“this completely bizarre food personality that people call Daddy
`now’—andobservedthat his generation was mostflippant when it came to
`serious things, “like health, or mortality.”Jason was mildly wary of his new
`nicotine habit, as most young Juulers are. There’s a whole genre of throwing-away-
`my-Juul videos on social media, with people tossing their vape into a river or a
`snowbank as dramatic music plays.
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`In Charlottesville, I went to the main library on campus to meet a freshman from
`Virginia Beach named Katie McCracken, whose contribution to the canon of
`college Juul-writing wastitled “Who Needs a Boyfriend When You Have a Juul?”
`In high school, she told me, she didn’t smoke or know anyone whodid. But at
`U.V.A. people were Juuling in the dorm lounges,trading Juulhits at parties,
`repping Juul in their Tinderprofiles, Juuling inside bars. “There are bouncers who
`will sell you a cheap Juul because they just find a ton of them on the ground,”she
`said. For college kids, drinking and Juuling go together: people wholike buzzes
`tend to mix them.
`
`Katie’s younger brother was a Juuler, she told me—“Hedoes a thing where he
`Juuls through his nose”—as was her twenty-three-year-old sister, who had
`switched from cigarettes. (“She sort of looks weird with the Juul, though, because
`she’s older.”) “I thought Juuls were so dumb whenI first saw them,”Katie said.
`“And then I wrote an article about how Juul is my boyfriend.”
`
`She took out her phone, opened Snapchat, and scrolled through her saved pics and
`videos: people hitting multiple Juuls simultaneously, her friends in dramatic poses
`with deadpan expressions and Juuls in their mouths. I burst out laughing at one
`captioned “100% Headass.” Remembering how Id sat in that library a decade
`earlier, sending a text message every few hours,I briefly felt old and sad. It was
`hard to imagine being in college and swiping through Tinder, watching Instagram
`Stories, sucking on electronics, getting push alerts about the warming Arctic and
`the latest Cabinet secretary to be fired. I asked Katie if she thought that Juul
`relieved her generation's anxiety or exacerbatedit. “I don't know,”she said. “People
`definitely stress-Juul. But everything wedo is like Tide Pods. Everyoneinthis
`generation is semi-ironically, like, We're readyto die.”
`
`She pulled out her Juul, which was coveredin iridescent stickers. Personalizationis
`big among young Juulers; some take a blowtorch to the Juul to turn the finish
`metallic, or buy “Juul skins” from third-party venders. Juul Wraps, a Florida-based
`companythatsells vinyl vape covers—patterns include the American flag and the
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`slogan “I Love Boobies”’—has been so successful that one of its three young co-
`founders recently bought himself a McLaren. (“To say we’re surprising our friends
`and family would be an understatement,” one of the other founders told me.)
`
`“Can I... maybe hit it?” I asked Katie.
`
`“Here?”she said.
`
`Welooked around conspiratorially. The big library lobby wasfull of people. We
`were within view of a café, a computerlab, a reference desk. She handed me the
`Juul, giggling quietly. I stuck it in the wrist of my sweater, inhaled, and blew out a
`little cloud of vapor. No one noticed. My mouth felt perky.
`
`“Mint!” Katie said.
`
`Three dayslater, I flew to California to visitJuul’s headquarters, in San
`
`Francisco. The company had recently moved from a cramped space in the
`Mission to a renovated warehouse in the Dogpatch, a gentrifying industrial
`neighborhoodthat wasfull of construction equipment beeping gently in the rain.
`Inside, the office was open-plan andairy, with forest-green trim on the windows
`and cream-colored walls. A glossy chocolate Labradorsat in the lunchroom,
`accepting ear scratchesin front of an impressive array of snacks—RxBars,
`Boomchickapop, M&Ms, waffle cookies—andfour fridges filled with LaCroix
`seltzer and craft beer. Another dog lounged underthe table in one of the
`conference rooms, which are named for San Francisco landmarks: Ocean Beach,
`Painted Ladies, Candlestick Park. Everyone looked indeterminately hip and
`focussed,like figures in an architectural rendering, if such figures occasionally
`Juuled.
`
`There are now around four hundred Juul employees. The companyis hiring so
`rapidly that about twenty new people show up every weekat the all-hands
`meeting. Many of the new hires come from other tech companies:Tesla, Fitbit,
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`Facebook. Some are former smokers who have switched to Juuling—oneofthe
`office’s few pieces ofvisible Juul paraphernalia is a large locked cabinet with a
`stack of pods that employees can purchaseat a discount. But manyof the people
`who workthere have never smoked or Juuled, and were averse to even meeting
`with the company until they were convinced that Juul presented an opportunity to
`work on a problem ofunrivalled magnitude. Ashley Gould, the company’s chief
`administrative officer, has workedat the genetic-testing company 23andMe and
`for companies that develop treatments for rare diseases. “I cameto feel that I
`could have greater impact on public health here than at any place I had ever
`worked before,” she told me.
`
`At the moment, companyexecutives are putting in long hours on the P.M.T-A.
`process, gunning to secure F.D.A.approval. Juul vaporizers and pods are built in
`clean roomsin Chinese factories, the all-white kind that require you to scrubin, as
`if for surgery; to eliminate humanerror, the company designed an enormous
`machine, the size of three bedrooms,forfilling the pods. Each device undergoes
`multiple rounds ofinspection. (The tests include hooking the vaporizer up to a
`hose that simulates a person inhaling for three full minutes.) ‘The liquid for the
`pods is shippedin five-gallon batches, each of which, the company told me,is
`subjected to a blind humantaste test for consistency. (The liquid is manufactured
`in the United States, though no one would tell me where; a spokesperson for the
`company called this “competitive information.”)
`
`Juul’s C.E.O., Kevin Burns, whois fifty-four, has a friendly dad-who-loves-his-
`vacation-house demeanor. He cameto Juul from Chobani last October. Burns
`described Juul to meas a “cigarette-killing company.” Before he accepted thejob,
`he said, he convened an informal focus group in his kitchen with his son, who’s in
`high school, and a few ofhis son’s friends. When he asked them aboutvaping,
`three kids pulled out their Juuls. He asked them whythey had these things, when
`they got them, how prevalent they were. Herealized, he said, that he was looking
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`at a challenge. “We havefrustrations about how the productis glorified on social
`media,” he told me.
`
`Juul is caught in a very particular dilemma: the more appealing the productis for
`smokers, the more appealingit’s likely to be for everyoneelse, including teen-
`agers. At a Manhattan location of Beyond Vape, in March, a sweet-natured clerk
`named Christ told me that he had smoked two packsa day since he was a teen-
`ager and that vapes had savedhis life. He showed mea vastarray of liquids, and
`explained the appeal ofvariousflavors for people trying to quit cigarettes. (His
`favorite: Phillip Rocke Honey Cream.) But Juulis frequently condemned for
`targeting young people with its sweeter flavors, which are limited to mango, créme
`brilée, mixed fruit, and cucumber. The company hasrefrained from introducing
`new flavors—thoughit has prototyped “tons” of them, Adam Bowensaid.
`
`Many Juulers I talked to found themselves taking in more nicotine with Juul than
`they had with cigarettes—going through a pod a day, say, when they were never
`pack-a-day smokers. A low-nicotine option would help ease their dependency, and
`the companybriefly experimented with lighter formulations. Currently, the pods
`are five per cent nicotine by weight. “You think, Let’s introduce these three-per-
`cent pods on our most popular flavor—let’s do it on mango,” Burnssaid. “Bu