How Juul created a market, fueled a crisis, and why regulators failed to stop it

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 21 June 2024

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When the vape brand Juul first hit the market back in 2015, e-cigarettes were in a kind of regulatory limbo. At the time, the rules that governed tobacco cigarettes did not explicitly apply to e-cigarettes. Then Juul blew up, fueled a public health crisis over teen vaping, and inspired a regulatory crackdown. But when the government finally stepped in to solve the problem of youth vaping, it may have actually made things worse.

Today's episode is a collaboration with the new podcast series "Backfired: the Vaping Wars." You can listen to the full series at audible.com/Backfired.

This episode was hosted by Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi and Leon Neyfakh. It was produced by Emma Peaslee and edited by Jess Jiang with help from Annie Brown. It was fact checked by Sofia Shchukina and engineered by Cena Loffredo. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	On this episode of Wild Card, comedian Taylor Tomlinson explains how you can use fear as a motivating force.
0:08.0	I was afraid that I would get years down the road and go, man, I really wish I had pursued that, or I wish I had developed this town
0:15.9	that might have taken me somewhere.
0:17.6	I'm Rachel Martin.
0:18.6	Join us for NPR's Wild Card Podcast,
0:20.9	the game where cards control the conversation.
0:24.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:27.0	Where does this whole story begin?
0:32.0	So our story begins in November of 2019 at the White House where President Donald Trump has become concerned about youth vaping.
0:42.0	This is journalist Leon Neyfoc. For the past year or so he's been
0:45.7	looking into the rise of e-cigarettes over the last couple of decades and that story
0:50.8	centers on one device in particular, the jewel.
0:54.8	So the jewel is a sleek little USB type device that became essentially the first mainstream
1:03.0	vape but at the time of this White House meeting back in 2019
1:07.3	the jewel was seen by a lot of people as this massive threat to public health
1:12.2	the numbers around teen use of jewel in particular are
1:16.7	skyrocketing. Everyone thought the war on youth smoking was over. Those numbers have been going down and down and
1:23.9	down. But here comes this new technology, this new device, the jewel that kids
1:28.7	seem to love. And so Trump decides to invite a whole bunch of stakeholders, people from parent groups, people from industry,
1:37.0	to have basically a apprentice style gathering to hash it out.
1:42.0	Okay, so this is like the reality TV approach. gathering to hash it out.
1:42.6	Okay, so this is like the reality TV approach to public health policy.
	...

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