In the ‘Juul room’: E-cigarettes spawn a new form of teen addiction

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/helpless-to-the-draw-of-nicotine-doctors-parents-and-schools-grapple-with-teens-addicted-to-e-cigarettes/2019/07/25/e1e8ac9c-830a-11e9-933d-7501070ee669_story.html

by bredren • 7 years ago

32 71 7 years ago

washingtonpost.com

t-writescode5• 7 years ago

Why aren’t we stopping kids from getting them?

Changing the flavor sounds needlessly draconian, as adults like apple and bubblegum, too.

You can flood your system with caffeine using over the counter caffeine pills, or ultra-high caffeine drinks.

You can flood your system with alcohol with everclear or unconventional ingestion methods.

Neither of these behaviors are as common as this article is trying to push about nicotine, probably mostly due to education and possibly due to the relative addictive nature of caffeine and alcohol.

This whole article, though, talks about teens, presumably underage ones, vaping. Isn’t that already illegal? Shouldn’t we get better at that part before we add more things?

exabrial• 7 years ago

Isn’t that already illegal? Shouldn’t we get better at that part before we add more things?

Pretty much the answer to every law that's passed. Why not just enforce the laws that we have?

dsfyu404ed• 7 years ago

Why not just enforce the laws that we have?

Because that's harder than patting yourself on the back for making it double illegal. You need to allocate funding, convince enforcement to care, etc, etc. Doing a good job enforcing a law requires buy in on basically every level. Making a law is a cakewalk by comparison.

snuxoll• 7 years ago

But the flavors encourage vulnerable teens to pick up the habit!

As if teens didn’t just get packs of cigarettes before, they just had to be more discrete about them. Kid next door smoked in his back yard and threw the butts over the fence into mine, that was just last year.

The whole thing is a joke, stores need to do a better job checking ID cards instead of the government creating draconian restrictions. The corner stores I frequent will sell me alcohol without carding me because they “all know who I am”, but the local smoke shop will card me EVERY SINGLE TIME even though they’ve seen me a dozen times (I personally appreciate this).

tempguy99995• 7 years ago

Agreed. If the smoke smelt of vomit...

conductr• 7 years ago

Won't make a lick of difference. Someone always has an older brother or friend. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

What they should do is just apply some friction. Like when you had to start getting OTC meds like Sudafed from the pharmacist. I don’t know if that’s federal or my state. But if you buy too much Sudafed you get on the meth cooker list.

augstein• 7 years ago

Great comment.

I‘m a bit afraid that alarmists and the likes will manage to restrict the sale and use of electronic cigarettes and nicotine-liquids for adults, as they already managed to do in a number of countries.

Products like the Juul are orders of magnitude less harmful than real smoking and I think adults should absolutely have the choice to use them. And yeah, many of them apparently like flavors such as Mango and Bubblegum instead of using liquids that claim to taste like tobacco.

Balgair7• 7 years ago

Products like the Juul are orders of magnitude less harmful than real smoking

Source?

abdullahkhalids2• 7 years ago

The great lesson from the Facebook et al. debacle we are going through is that a technology that starts out benign and sometimes very useful (think Facebook in the first few years) can morph over time under economic and ideological pressures into something highly harmful to society at large (Facebook today). Second, the expertise developed due to a product existing can also be dangerous. Every technique created by the online-ad industry is now being used to derail democracy across the world.

Let's analyze Juul using the second point. Juul is an experiment modern technology is being leveraged to determine how quickly an addictive substance can be used to alter brain chemistry. The techniques learned from e-cigarettes (using data from tens of thousands of users) will in a few years be used for other hard drugs. Juul is turning a blind eye to kids using its products, but the drug mafias will actively pursue kids and get them hooked onto highly dangerous drugs using new high tech drug delivery devices. Yes, these devices already exist, but they are not being widely used and studied by scientists in methodical fashion, and published in journals.

Now the first point. Pretty soon, competitors will decide that the easy way to beat Juul is to make their own e-cigarette more addictive. From there, its going to be a rat race to the bottom where every company in the space will devolve to R&D labs trying to create the most addictive e-cigarette possible.

Do you really want to live in this future?

dgacmu• 7 years ago

Because people are awfully good at getting around laws preventing the purchase of things, particularly when those things are legally purchasable by adults -- c.f., cigarettes, alcohol. It's not crazy to think that a multi-pronged approach would be more effective: Try to reduce sales both sales _and appeal_ to underage people. We do this with alcohol, for example, particularly high-alcohol malt liquor [1]. We ban or restrict advertising when it's likely to reach children. [2]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5391327/

[2] https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2013/who_ban_t...

t-writescode5• 7 years ago

How is this different from flavored alcohol in appeal, though? You could buy bubble gum or chocolate or any other sort of flavor for alcohol, and primarily hard alcohol, at that! Or harder, at least (30 proof+)

JamesBarney2• 7 years ago

I don't think we target high-alcohol malt liquor (which is less alcoholic than many ipas or any wine) because of the alcohol %.

Balgair7• 7 years ago

Shouldn’t we get better at that part before we add more things?

Addictions are very pernicious things. Other methonds to combat addictive substances have similarly failed and succeded in varying ways. Look at the Opiod crisis, despite the pills being highly controlled and only given out via the supervision of multiple highly educated doctors, it became an epidemic of additction in parts of the US. The opiods overcame the laws and many people's best intentions.

Nicotine is a different addiction, for sure, but the Opiod crisis provides a good case study.

To combat these things, using multiple overlapping methods is a good idea. Laws, yes. Enforcement, yes. Restrictions on advertising, yes. Taking flavors out, yes. taking candy out of the packaging, yes. All of it together, yes. It is likely to take a multi pronged approach.

Per the article, it does seem that these vape pens are a different animal from traditional cigarettes. It seems that there are significant health risks that are really hurting real people in the real world. It seems that these people are victims of their addictions and victims of the people in the companies that push and sell these things.

More data is needed, of course, and I am not a prosecutor in a court of law.

But, it seems like these companies are trying to hurt children for money.

mieseratte• 7 years ago

Look at the Opiod crisis, despite the pills being highly controlled and only given out via the supervision of multiple highly educated doctors

They may be highly controlled now, but they weren't for decades which is how we have gotten to this point.

darkpuma3• 7 years ago

"Changing the flavor sounds needlessly draconian, as adults like apple and bubblegum, too."

I heard this same sort of thing back when Obama banned flavored cigarettes. I wasn't very sympathetic to it back then and I'm still not. But with the passage of several years I think we should be able to evaluate the impact of banning flavored cigarettes. Have any adults been unduly impacted by this restriction? I can't imagine how anybody would be, but there is no reason to speculate since it's been several years. Is there any demonstrable harm caused by the banning of fruity flavor cigarettes?

sigstoat• 7 years ago

Is there any demonstrable harm caused by the banning of fruity flavor cigarettes?

loss of freedom.

you should have to demonstrate some value to the ban.

awinder• 7 years ago

To be clear, I’m pretty sure that was a voluntary move on juul’s part, you can still buy those flavors of pods on their websites. Supposedly they are coming back to stores when juul can confidently deploy the age verification system they want.

quelltext2• 7 years ago

We should make sure teenagers are getting the right support and try to prevent exposure to addictive substances.

At the same time we should be skeptical of anecdotes like the ones in the article.

But it was his demeanor that scared her most. Cade Beauparlant’s anxiety and mood swings worsened, his outbursts so sudden and so explosive that his mother said she came to fear him.

I really think that might for the most part simply be due to this thing called puberty.

“We kind of lost four years of Cade to this addiction,” Kristin Beauparlant said. Now that he has cut back, “He just seems like a different kid. You can’t help but say there’s a correlation.”

Yes, a correlation maybe, but who is to say of what nature.

When I was a teenager I also had a pretty rough time dealing with my family and in particular my overprotective mum. So did many of my mates to varying degrees.

Nicotine addiction certainly doesn't help, but at that age people are easily "addicted" to many things. I believe video game addiction was more common than tobacco in my peer group (, my point being that it might not matter too much whether that thing is vaping or some other activity that's addictive and, important, frowned upon by parents, unlike for instance sports). Also a time to engage in generally stupid and dangerous behavior. Nobody likes to get their favorite thing/toy/or freedom to go out get taken away. In puberty teenagers start to realize that they can actually try to stand up to their parents. Parents are scared when their precious child doesn't follow the rules, or speaks up, which ends up in a spiral of back and forth that sometimes escalates to the point where parents "don't recognize their kids anymore".

Then typically after a few years shit calms down again with stabilized hormones, everyone having pushed and explored their boundaries, and the prospect of only a short amount of time left under the parents' direct control before leaving for college.

nr2x• 7 years ago

I started smoking as a teen and quit smoking regularly over a decade ago. If I so much as smell a cigarette I immediately want one, if I see people smoking in a movie or real life I want one, and hell, if I'm just having a shit day I want one. Thinking about it just now makes me want one.

So yes, puberty does things to you, but they tend to be temporary. The cognitive triggers of nicotine addiction stay long after you "quit".

quelltext2• 7 years ago

Yeah, because you enjoyed smoking cigarettes and then decided to give it up. On it's own there's nothing bad or surprising about wanting to smoke again.

People who have given up eating meat for health reasons will also often lust for a steak when they see one being eaten in a movie.

But my intention is actually not to claim there's no such thing as nicotine addiction.

My claim is that I find it unlikely that it's vaping or smoking that turns teenagers into crazy impulsive, and moody people.

tempguy99995• 7 years ago

AIUI nicotine is not especially addictive on its own; without a type of chemical known as an MAOI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoamine_oxidase_inhibitor) it is minimally addictive (https://www.biopsychiatry.com/nicotine-mao.htm)

" Although nicotine is generally considered to be the main compound responsible for the addictive properties of tobacco, experimental data indicate that nicotine does not exhibit all the characteristics of other abused substances, such as psychostimulants and opiates. [...] Because tobacco smoke contains monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) and decreases MAO activity in smokers, we have combined MAOIs with nicotine to determine whether it is possible to obtain a locomotor response to nicotine in C57Bl6 mice. [...] Finally, it was found that, whereas naive rats did not readily self-administer nicotine (10 mug/kg/injection), a robust self-administration of nicotine occurred when animals were pretreated with tranylcypromine (3 mg/kg). Our data suggest that MAOIs contained in tobacco and tobacco smoke act in synergy with nicotine to enhance its rewarding effects. "

Tranylcypromine is an MAOI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tranylcypromine)

Does anyone know what a locomotor response is? I did a search but got nothing usefu.

Ciggies contain MAOIs, vapes don't (I believe, and they should never be allowed to, but...). Nicotine is seemingly much less addictive without it. This fits in with my own experience, I used nicotine tablets for smoking reduction as a recreational drug, and as an alternative to coffee to wake me up (it's a light buzz, no more). I don't find it addictive, meaning I don't use it much and it doesn't 'call to me' in the way chewing tobacco did when I tried that.

Balgair7• 7 years ago

Locomotor responses are likely related to the nAChR (Nicotinic acetylcholine receptor) [0], though I couldn't find the exact source in the documents you linked to.

"They are found in the central and peripheral nervous system, muscle, and many other tissues of many organisms. At the neuromuscular junction they are the primary receptor in muscle for motor nerve-muscle communication that controls muscle contraction. In the peripheral nervous system: (1) they transmit outgoing signals from the presynaptic to the postsynaptic cells within the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, and (2) they are the receptors found on skeletal muscle that receive acetylcholine released to signal for muscular contraction. "

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotinic_acetylcholine_recept...

GuB-42• 7 years ago

I didn't realize tobacco contains MAOIs.

I wonder what happens when mixed with DMT.

For information, DMT is a powerful psychedelic hallucinogen found in several plants. It isn't active orally because it is destroyed by MAOs. To make it active, it can be mixed with MAOIs, that's how Ayahuasca is made. A MAOI/DMT mix called Changa can also be smoked, but AFAIK, it doesn't contain tobacco as a main ingredient, Ayahuasca vine is used instead.

tempguy99995• 7 years ago

I'm aware of DMT and its need for MAOIs. If you don't have this https://www.amazon.co.uk/Psychedelics-Encyclopedia-Peter-Sta... may I recommend you race to the local bookstore and order it. It's a fantastic, thorough and scientific book.

And at less than 30 quid, that's cheaper than 3 packs of cigs and a damn sight more interesting.

seisvelas• 7 years ago

If nicotine addiction is relatively harmless without conventional cigarettes, who cares? A lot of teens also have mild coffee addictions.

Is this as harmful as, say, Pringles? Or trampolines? I think the reason this stirs up outrage is because it's 'smoking' which is seen as an adult activity that children must be shielded from, whereas many other harmful behaviors are associated with children and thus 'okay'.

neaden• 7 years ago

The problem is we don't know if it is harmless. We don't know what the short and long term effects of this is going to be. We don't know if these teens are going to be more likely to smoke cigarettes later in life. And when you are dealing with an industry that has a long history of lying about the health effects of its products I think it is correct to be concerned. We shouldn't assume that Juul is safe.

smileysteve• 7 years ago

We don't know what the short and long term effects of this is going to be.

We're seeing studies showing that with nicotine there is arterial hardening.

darkpuma3• 7 years ago

If nicotine addiction is relatively harmless without conventional cigarettes, who cares?

Because we aren't doing anybody any favors when we permit the industry to give teenagers a chemical addiction to their commercial product, even if their product were harmful in no ways other than financial.

(Yes, I also object in strong terms to other addictive substances in consumer products, don't even bother replying with whataboutism.)

tempguy99995• 7 years ago

Were nicotine harmless I'd be ok with teenagers getting hooked on it. After all many of them are hooked on excessive sugar consumption and that is not harmless. Better to care about where the harm really lies than where it doesn't (again, if nicotine is harmless).

Please don't say "aargh, drugs!" and lose your cool. We need a rational not emotional response or things will be made worse.

t-writescode5• 7 years ago

If they’re directly advertising to kids, that’s a problem and already illegal. If they’re making universally enjoyed flavors, like apple, I don’t see a problem with that specifically, if we are going to continue to allow the ingestion of nicotine for any adult.

Again, if they are advertising to children, that is a very, very serious problem and should be dealt with immediately. Selling apple or caramel or chocolate or mint flavor is not sufficient, in my opinion.

Arguably, advertising flavor at all is sufficient, but don’t we already have laws for advertising, period?

goda902• 7 years ago

It might actually be harmful: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/vaping-lung-damage-eight-teens-...

tinkertamper2• 7 years ago

There's a fairly recent Nature article out of Belgium that did a pretty good job of showing vaping nicotine screws up the cardiovascular system just like conventional cigarettes. It can get a bit technical at times but overall should be somewhat understandable to most people. If nothing else, please skim the discussion section. To quote: "Nicotine exerts pharmacologic effects that could contribute to acute cardiovascular events and accelerated atherogenesis experienced by cigarette smokers." Atherogenesis = plaque formation in the arteries = lots and lots of bad stuff.

JamesBarney2• 7 years ago

Mind linking to the study?

DanBC3• 7 years ago

Every day in the US 2000 children under the age of 18 smoke their first cigarette.

It's important to switch those children to vaping or not smoking.

But all those other children who aren't smoking? There's almost no benefit to them from vaping, and there are disadvantages and risks. Vaping costs money, it's potentially addictive, some of the flavours can be harmful, the devices can be low quality and catch fire etc. These might be small quantities of risk, but across a population of 350m people it adds up to a bunch of people harmed for no benefit.

navigatesol2• 7 years ago

There's almost no benefit to them from vaping

The benefit is the most influential of all: catching a buzz. We do all kinds of things in search of that. It's the start and end to why people smoke.

goda902• 7 years ago

On reddit there is often talk about subtle corporate manipulation of front page content. Memes, "interesting facts", etc that are subtle references to some brand can be found quite often. Vaping memes were definitely big for awhile, and I would not be at all surprised if some of them were made by someone paid by an e-cigarette maker.

koolba• 7 years ago

Assuming Reddit keeps IP logs this should be easy to verify and could be powerful evidence in court.

eli• 7 years ago

Certainly possible, but I would not be surprised if they were "organic" either.

ozborn• 7 years ago

goda90 is correct, this months Scientific American shows you can differentiate between organic posting and corporate posting for vaping.

bredren2• 7 years ago

OP here. I am no corporate shill. My friend had some guests visiting who were grown adults and seemed totally addicted to their juul. It was kind of sad how they talked about the device and worried over its whereabouts.

Also, I'm not sure but I think that this post was hidden from display?

Animats• 7 years ago

It's all part of the plan to keep the masses drugged and quiet. Along with marijuana legalization and weak regulation of prescription opiates. The drugs being encouraged are all ones that cause passivity. That's what we need to keep the useless part of the population passive.

tk75x• 7 years ago

If they're "useless" as you say, what's the problem with keeping them passive? Your arguments about marijuana legalization and weak regulation of prescription opiates also don't jive with your "keep the population passive" stance. Marijuana was made illegal with the intent of making it easier to incarcerate non-white populations and weak regulation of opiates was intended to keep people addicted so the big pharmaceutical companies could keep profiting.

klondike_• 7 years ago

Juul and other e-cigarette makers should be required to sell 0 nicotine versions of all of their flavors.

Like alcohol, it is impossible to totally prevent teens from getting ahold of them as long as it is legal for adults.

If you completely ban vaping devices, smokers lose an effective option to quit.

Mandatory 0 nicotine juices would allow the adults who buy these products for underage users to discreetly give underage users non addictive juice. I suspect that kids don't really want a nicotine addiction, they just vape because it's trendy. If 0 nicotine juice were the default kids wouldn't get addicted and would get bored of vaping just like any other fad.

tj-teej• 7 years ago

Not being snarky, but have you ever seen kids drinking 0% beer? I sympathize with your idea but I don't think that it would play out that way in real-life. I think taboo plays into the attraction of these kinds of drugs.

chaseha• 7 years ago

The biggest issue w/ vape pens like Juul is the discreteness factor - I have coworkers that use them constantly at work, even at client sites.

Older box-style vaporizers are not inconspicuous, chic, or sexy - but the sleek form factor of a Juul is easy to carry around and looks cool.

Maybe restricting their size/portability would help make them less attractive?

Hasz• 7 years ago

Barrage of anecdotes ahead, in the absence of good data. I also have a pretty big interest in the company, despite not vaping. I have a small write up on designing my own Juul pods (delving into the chemistry) on my site https://ethanmye.rs/fixed/projects/juulpods/

I am a college student (probably Juul's main target audience) in the US. Juuling in unbelievably popular, for a couple of big reasons.

It's discrete -- no visible vapor, smell is noticeable, but not an obscene scent.

Widely available - pods can be bought anywhere, pawned off friends, etc

Crazy addictive -- there's someone else here talking about research into MAOI prompting nicotine, but it's important to note nicotine is available in two forms -- as a freebase, and as a salt. Previously, vapes were limited in concentration of freebase nicotine to a few mg/ml of nicotine, owing to the harshness of anything higher. Juul turned freebase nicotine into a salt, allowing them to push the concentration waaaaaaaaaay higher. IIRC, it's something like 60mg/ml. They use benzoic acid, but also have patents on basically every acid you could think of, even choices that would be terrible for you, like sulfuric acid. The patent info is a wealth of interesting tidbits -- vaping a salt pushes nicotine into the bloodstream way faster than basically any other method except IV.

Excellent marketing. They say they don't market to kids, but let's be honest -- that ad spend is getting in front of kids well under 18, and they know it. All the need is the plausible deniability to say they didn't target 18 years, and they're good.

I should also point out these guys are making money hand over fist. They're selling, for $4, a pod with 700uL of liquid in it -- this works out to about $15,000 a gallon, for maybe $10 in ingredients, $20 if they switch to synthetic nicotine, which would let them push concentrations even higher. It's a printer and ink model, except the printer is probably the most addictive chemical we know of, other than maybe meth.

I should mention that while I greatly respect Juul's business savy, I have nothing but disdain for them otherwise.

They could EASILY create a program to taper smokers off cigarettes or their own product. There's a fucking microcontroller in the Juul, just reduce the total dose by say, 2% a day and sell pods with decreasing nicotine concentration until people are free of nicotine.

Regardless of what they say in front of congressional panels, their marketing IS reaching large number of kids, something that is just too convenient.

Their pod design also sucks. Not refillable, complicated, and leaky. Offer a program to buy back old pods (or a discount on a new purchase), or design a new pods.

bredren2• 7 years ago

Thanks for this post. See my other comment about noticing friend's adult guests who were addicted to their Juul. I'm deeply suspicious of this company and its products.

013a• 7 years ago

Articles like this come dangerously close to insanity with respect to their reflection of the truth.

I hear people say: "They make such sweet, fruity flavors to appeal to kids." Uh; what? Have you tried Juul Mango pods? (No, you haven't. Yet you write about it.) They aren't sweet. They aren't fruity. They're basically just north enough of disgusting to be palatable. They taste like what I imagine six year old freeze-dried astronaut food mangos steeped in embalming fluid would taste like.

I hear people say: "These nicotine addictions are so bad, they're so hard to quit." Uh; what? Have you ever had a nicotine addiction? (No, you haven't. Yet you write about it.) Not cigarettes; tobacco has additional MAOI chemicals which make the addiction substantially worse. I'm talking about pure nicotine. I'd grade quitting it as 25% worse than a caffeine addiction. I'd imagine it's worse for developing brains (which is why all nicotine should be 21+ at least). But it's not like we're talking about meth here.

I hear people say: "Juul is to blame for this." Shut the fuck up. Your kid illegally obtained a nicotine delivery device and is somehow illegally keeping it topped up with pods. The audacity that you have to sue Juul for this is, quite frankly, astounding. He may be going through 3 or 4 pods a week, maybe more; how the hell is he getting these? That's on you, first and foremost, as the parent. Secondly, and strictly secondly, there is an onus on society to make sure distribution of these chemicals is regulated and enforced. We've got some work to continue doing here, but let's be clear: getting rid of the "sweet" and "delicious" fruit flavors won't help even a little bit.

lunias• 7 years ago

I'm tired of the "harming our youth" angle. It's pointing out a needlessly specific example of our complete and systemic inability to control substances.

Educate people the best you can as a society, use legislation to support the distribution of truth, and allow natural selection to take care of the rest.

If your teen is addicted to vaping and it bothers you, then you have failed yourself as a parent; don't put that guilt on others. At least your son / daughter has one of the least hazardous addictions in human history.

In the ‘Juul room’: E-cigarettes spawn a new form of teen addiction

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