To be clear, Juul has made more mistakes than I have space to list here. (I wrote a whole book about them and have covered them extensively for this magazine.) Its first marketing campaign—which the company has repeatedly denied was meant to attract kids—was, at the very least, ill-advised. It was too easy, for too long, for underage customers to buy Juul products online and in stores. Juul executives sent company representatives into schools to educate kids about the dangers of vaping, despite the sordid history of tobacco companies doing the same. They then accepted almost $13 billion from tobacco giant Altria, raising significant conflict of interest concerns. Though Juul has behaved more responsibly in recent years, it’s not hard to understand why it earned so much public scrutiny.
The FDA’s denial didn’t focus on any of those very public mistakes. Instead, the agency ordered Juul off the market because “insufficient and conflicting data” raised concerns about genetic damage and chemicals leaching out of Juul’s e-liquid pods. The FDA said it does not have “information to suggest an immediate hazard” linked to Juul products, but any concern about health risks needs to be taken seriously.
Still, some public-health experts wondered aloud whether politics also played a role. “Given the political pressure brought to bear by tobacco-control groups, parent groups, and members of Congress to ban Juul, one wonders whether this decision was solely based on safety,” Clifford Douglas, director of the University of Michigan’s Tobacco Research Network, told the Washington Post.
A former Juul employee with knowledge of the company’s FDA application put it to me more bluntly: “Many of these decisions are political,” they said. “They’re not necessarily based on the evidence.”
Zeller categorically denies that politics influenced the FDA’s decision. “I know that a lot of people who are pro-harm-reduction and pro-e-cigarette were very disappointed in this,” he says. “I understand how others have reacted, but this is the way the system is supposed to work. This was a science-based decision by subject-matter experts.”
The question is what the effects of that decision will be. The impact among teenagers might be smaller than Juul’s history would suggest. In the latest federal study on teen vaping, about 6% of high school vapers listed Juul as their preferred brand, while 26% said their go-to brand was Puff Bar—which makes flavored, disposable vaporizers that are still for sale.
If Juul doesn’t win its appeal and must remove its products from the market, many adult users will probably switch to another e-cigarette, either one that has been authorized by the FDA or remains for sale as it waits in regulatory limbo. But if I’ve learned anything in reporting on vaping, it’s that vapers are passionate about and loyal to whatever product helps them stop smoking. So potentially taking one of the biggest brands off the market is not trivial.
When I was reporting my book on Juul, multiple people—some who had worked at Juul and some who had watched the vaping industry evolve from outside the company—said Juul’s story was one of missed opportunities. If Juul, the company, had acted more responsibly—if it hadn’t been so popular with teenagers, if it hadn’t angered regulators, if it hadn’t lit the match that started a political firestorm—perhaps Juul, the product, could have made a real difference for public health.
Would it have been “one of the greatest opportunities for public health in the history of mankind,” as co-founder James Monsees once said? That’s probably an overstatement. A major research review published last year concluded that e-cigarettes could help about three additional smokers out of 100 ditch cigarettes, compared to traditional nicotine-replacement therapies like gums and patches. That’s not a massive difference—but it is still a difference, both for public health and for those three hypothetical smokers.
That’s not to say the FDA had an easy choice on its hands, only that there is more nuance to the vaping debate than is sometimes expressed. Zeller, for his part, wishes the tobacco-control community was more willing to look for common ground when it comes to vaping.
“I wish that the pro-e-cigarette people were not completely dismissive of the concerns the other side has about unintended consequences” like youth use and addiction, Zeller says. “But in the same breath, I wish that the anti-e-cigarette people were more open-minded on the potential upside of a properly regulated marketplace.”
The FDA’s decision on Juul lives in that gray area. Even if it was ultimately the right choice, based on troubling toxicology data or concerns about underage use, to cast Juul’s potential removal from the market as an unmitigated win for public health feels overly simplistic. There is some loss tied up with it, too.
