Juul Labs CEO to Step Down

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-25/juul-labs-ceo-to-step-down-amid-growing-vaping-backlash

121 142 7 years ago

And he is being replaced by a former Marlboro employee. I am sure the public will feel so much safer knowing that the advertising will be handled by a Big Tobacco veteran moving forward.

ceejayoz9• 7 years ago

Altria (Phillip Morris) owns 35% of the company already. They've been part of Big Tobacco for a while.

aivisol• 7 years ago

Not just some employee, but "chief growth officer at the Marlboro maker"...

AdmiralAsshat2• 7 years ago

I originally had the word "executive," but realized that would be technically incorrect.

tibbydudeza• 7 years ago

Technically he worked for "Altria" ... surely a better name than Cancer Stick Inc.

ojnabieoot• 7 years ago

The public should probably feel a bit better about having a tobacco veteran who knows better than to get the bosses in trouble by deliberately market to kids. Juul's former CEO took the startup strategy: disruptfluence the vape market by winnovating a "let's just sell them in high schools directly" strategy.

mandelbrotwurst2• 7 years ago

Falsely claiming that Juul was selling their products directly to high schoolers inside high schools isn't a very strong argument.

Edit: I agree examples cited below arguably constitute selling.

That said, if this is what parent was referring to, would likely have been better to say so since this isn't what selling implies when stated without any qualifier.

fragmede• 7 years ago

Philip Morris' did $29.6 billion in sales last year. I'm not convinced a tobacco company veteran actually believes advertising to kids is immoral, given how much money is at stake. A tobacco veteran would have insider knowledge of how the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement[0] came to be, and how better to skirt those regulations.

[0] https://www.publichealthlawcenter.org/topics/commercial-toba...

minwcnt5• 7 years ago

Kevin Burns was only CEO for about 1.5 years, so I would put the blame on marketing to kids on his predecessor.

lazyguy2• 7 years ago

All the 'big names' companies like 'Juul' and 'Blu' are heavily invested in by 'Big Tobacco'. These are the companies you see in gas stations and convenience stores across the America.

But these big companies can't compete with all the Vape Shops that are insanely popular and are everywhere.

This is why there is just a big hubbub over regulation and the deaths over black market Marijuana cartridges. These massive corporations can afford to deal with things like FDA certification of flavors and such things.

Were as the small companies, that make up the bulk of the vape market, cannot. So they will get pushed out of the market and 'big tobacco' will be the only ones that are allowed to sell in the USA. They really don't care if they have bad names and are used as targets by the regulators when they are going to be the only ones allowed to sell to the public.

Governments are going along with this because tobacco is a massive tax base. They can't regulate small business and internet sales in the same manner they can regulate and tax a small number of massive corporations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

According to 'Lung Cancer Fact Sheet' there was a estimated 154,000 Americans that would of died to lung cancer in 2018. Tobacco smoking contributes to all types of cancer.

This is why Vaping, which should cut these lung cancer rates by over 95%, is one of the most important public health break-throughs in recent memory.

If allowed to continue to exist in the way it is now it should do more to cut down on cancer deaths then billions of dollars in medical research spent in the past 20 years.

People have found that vaping is massively more effective at helping them to quit smoking compared to patches, gum, or any other medical-grade nicotine delivery method. It's extremely cheap, it's effective, and it's safe and has none of the side effects associated with any other type of drug being sold by doctors to help people quit.

And yet you have politicians now scrambling all over each other to flush this miracle down the toilet to protect their tax revenue and help out 'Big Tobacco'.

And when you look close at the facts behind 'vaping deaths' it's pretty obvious that these are related to drug prohibition more then anything else. These are deaths that are massively contributed to by regulation. If people bought those cartridges from gas stations or vape shops they would still be alive, but they couldn't because they were illegal in their states.

Alex39172• 7 years ago

This is why Vaping, which should cut these lung cancer rates by over 95%, is one of the most important public health break-throughs in recent memory.

I mean smoking shouldn't really cause cancer to begin with. It really depends on how much radioactive material is in ecigs, which afaik we don't know yet.

rsuelzer3• 7 years ago

Thank you for this. I have struggled with addiction my whole life and switched to a tank based e-cig seven years ago and have not had a full cigarette since.

I say fill cigarette because I use fruit flavored liquids and it helped me develop an aversion to the taste of Tobacco and smoke. A few years ago I had a few drags of a cigarette at a party and it made me want to throw up.

Not saying what I do is harmless, but it's a major harm reduction for me. I went from having some pretty serious lung issues to being able to do intense cardio workouts for several hours without any problems breathing.

bredren• 7 years ago

From previous discussions here, I took that Juul juice is formulated differently than other vaping juices, with a much higher nicotine amount.

I agree vaping can help stop cigarette use, but I am not sure they are all equally good at this.

tomnipotent• 7 years ago

Were as the small companies, that make up the bulk of the vape market, cannot

Juul owns 70% of the vape market.

xphilter• 7 years ago

"This is why Vaping, which should cut these lung cancer rates by over 95%, is one of the most important public health break-throughs in recent memory."

Not so sure about this. If the recent lung illnesses are tied to vaping, then that really can't be true.

Also, the 154,000 dying of lung cancer would undoubtedly be those who started smoking tobacco decades ago. The overall trend of smoking tobacco is downward. That alone would decrease the future number of lung cancer deaths. Hard to pin that on vaping, which seems to be (even just a few short years after widespread adoption) is leading to sudden cases of lung illnesses/deaths.

NeedMoreTea6• 7 years ago

The UK picture is the big tobacco brands are everywhere and so ludicrously expensive. Yet barely sell, and don't get much point of sale love from the retailer. They feel like a line their tobacco rep gave them a discount to carry, yes just about everywhere. £1-£1.50 for 10ml in a vape shop, £1 in the Poundshop and discounters, £4-£5 in a corner shop or petrol station. You can wait out vaping 100x easier than waiting out needing a smoke. Well I always could. Seemed like there was something "extra" in the tobacco more addictive than the nicotine.

The few places that were moving some have mostly started selling independent vaping brands. My local petrol station now carries a couple. Still expensive, but "sanely" expensive.

With the exception of Juul, big tobacco appears to be failing badly at vaping.

maxerickson• 7 years ago

States tend to increase per pack taxes because of the reduction in smoking. They don't engage in revenue maximization.

mfoy_2• 7 years ago

Outline: https://outline.com/XZ7M3t

mfoy_2• 7 years ago

Also, (forgive me if I get the jargon wrong here...) isn't the vaping health crisis the article mentions due to sketchy THC vaping solutions that have Vitamin E oil in them? Not Juul's nicotine stuff?

I.e. because THC isn't water-soluble, it has to be suspended/dissolved in some oil-based thing. Lipids + lungs = BAD.

grenoire• 7 years ago

Problem is that even though the Juul cartridges are proprietary, that hasn't stopped people from making Juul-compatible off-brand products. There are of course other concerns besides the vaporised oils.

arzt• 7 years ago

Vitamin E acetate and myclobutanil are the most likely culprits. Myclobutanil is a fungicide that cannabis growers use to prevent mildew. It also turns into cyanide when heated.

Speculation: State governments are leveraging the hysteria to slow a loss in excise tax revenue stemming from the decline in combustible cigarette use.

wyldfire• 7 years ago

Regulatory crackdown was probably spawned by the deaths caused by bad THC solvents. But while regulators peruse the industry they found that nicotine vapor companies like Juul had plenty of their own misdeeds.

346794• 7 years ago

That's not how I see it. Regulators started cracking down on JUUL a couple years ago and drove the value of the company down until Phillip Morris bought 35÷. Then they backed off until JUUL started losing market share to the new generation of refillable vapes that use nicotine salt like the JUUL system. The difference? JUUL pods aren't meant to be refilled, and 4 pods with a total of 2 mL of juice will cost $20 in most states. With a refillable system, you can have 30mL of the same strength juice for $20.

So, here come the regulators again to protect big tobacco. They want strict controls on who can manufacture juice. Less competition =more profit. JUUL only has a handful of flavors compared to the thousands of alternatives. So, here come the regulators to limit the flavors. And surely it's just a coincidence that the one flavor they really want to limit it to is tobacco, Phillip Morris's bread and butter.

If you've been vaping a cucumber rosehips menthol juice every day, cigarette will taste like absolute shit. But if you only have the option of vaping tobacco flavored juice? Well, then a cigarette might not sound so bad.

Sure, I agree that JUUL hasn't been an angel, and probably are guilty of marketing to kids. But that all started being investigated well before the tainted THC carts started making people sick.

vkou2• 7 years ago

There's two vaping crises.

One is THC vaping solutions that are killing people.

The second is that we're currently living through a meteoric rise in nicotine addiction among teenagers. For a very long time, teenage nicotine use was going down, due to declines in smoking rates. Smoking rates still continue to decline, but nicotine vaping rates have gone up and to the right. 1 in 4 high school students are now vaping nicotine. That number is growing by ~20% year over year.

This is a public health crisis.

346794• 7 years ago

If it's not killing people, how is it a health crisis? Would it be a public health crisis if we had a meteoric rise in teens swimming, given that the risk of death or illness from swimming is far higher than it is from vaping?

zosterops2• 7 years ago

Is caffeine addiction a serious public health crisis?

Nictoine on its own is no more harmful than caffeine.

https://news.sky.com/story/nicotine-no-worse-than-cup-of-cof...

decebalus14• 7 years ago

This is a public health crisis.

No, no it's not. It's a manufactured hysteria which is now used by the government to squeeze tobacco companies by the nuts. It's the new 'ear sexing' that dem kids are doing. Its parents too busy to monitor their kids and schools stretched too thin to monitor their bathrooms and hallways. No amount of regulation will fix that. Remember when Marijuana was illegal? Yeah, the kids were totally not smoking it. Thank God for the war on drugs to cut down on teens getting high.

situational87• 7 years ago

There is no clear answer yet, but some signs are pointing to the metal parts used in cartridges/vape chambers being the cause.

Maybe just in counterfeit knockoffs, maybe not. It's unclear.

jnbiche• 7 years ago

Yes, the vaping deaths almost certainly are from black market, contaminated THC pods/cartridges.

But why let a few facts get in the way of perfectly good outrage?

Note: I'm not a smoker, but I feel strongly that vaping has the potential to dramatically decrease smoking deaths. More research is needed in lieu of the current media and government-driven hysteria.

kjar• 7 years ago

There is an emerging argument that vaping is less health damaging than smoking and it likely is, however, Nicotine addiction is key to the business model and that will not change.

whatshisface• 7 years ago

That's not an emerging argument, that's been the argument from the start.

rsuelzer3• 7 years ago

Assuming that they can remain the only suppliers of Nicotine.

throwaway8573842• 7 years ago

I get how this is happening and is independent from other things going on in the world... But what is the deal with all these CEO's stepping down?

tudelo• 7 years ago

Confirmation bias? Better access to information?

throwaway8573842• 7 years ago

Could be, looking at my usual business news site, they got 4 stories about CEO's resigning. Very atypical, but could just be part of a abnormally on a normal distribution.

cameronbrown• 7 years ago

True randomness doesn't always look like random?

xwdv• 7 years ago

Recession coming.

paggle• 7 years ago

It’s a great way to say “oh, this is so bad, we’ve gotten rid of the horrible man who was responsible!” while also changing absolutely nothing.

goatsi• 7 years ago

To be succeeded by a former tobacco executive. The takeover of Juul by big tobacco is now complete, and they have someone with strong experience downplaying, denying and obfuscating to weather the storm.

346794• 7 years ago

Next up: regulatory capture. Vaping right now is super cheap because of all the options from different companies. So what's a multibillion dollar international conglomerate to do? Well, make the little guys go away with onerous regulations, of course. It's the American Way™.

mc322• 7 years ago

Making pure ingredients compliant with good manufacturing process is expensive. It has lots of redundancy and things on the outside we consider waste. But experience tells us all these measures are necessary to ensure we get what we expect to get when we buy products that can cause great harm if incorrect.

dntrkv• 7 years ago

A Juul habit is not super cheap, it’s more expensive than an equivalent cigarette habit, by far.

JMTQp8lwXL3• 7 years ago

They reached out to me on LinkedIn. Don't know why they need software engineers, but I don't think I'm aligned with their mission -- whatever it may be.

mieseratte• 7 years ago

Should've at least talked to a recruiter to hear them out, I'd be too curious not to. Years back I'd had a recruiter for one of the world's largest pornographers reach out to me, was very interesting to learn about what they do and how they do it.

JMTQp8lwXL3• 7 years ago

To be honest, I usually don't turn down phone calls for new opportunities -- even if I expect them to not go much of anywhere -- since it's a new connection, and you never know where the conversation could go. In this case, it was the name that threw me off.

olcor• 7 years ago

I did talk to a recruiter hiring for Juul, the one time they called me. Their only selling point was how fast the company was growing. This was around the time Altria bought them.

Japhy_Ryder• 7 years ago

Who cares if you're "aligned with a mission"? It's a paycheck.

gdulli• 7 years ago

There are many ways to get a paycheck. What's confusing about having values and working them into your decision about where to get it?

The job I have doesn't improve the world, I accept that. But it also doesn't make the world a worse place. I sure as hell would never work for an industry that's creating or enabling smokers. No matter how legal.

president• 7 years ago

I imagine this is the same thing Facebook employees say when they decide to work on features that invade people's privacy. Great for the person that gets paid, terrible for society.

Crespyl2• 7 years ago

In addition to the paycheck, some people like to be rewarded with the knowledge (or at least hope) that their work is somehow making the world a slightly better place, or at least not making things worse for somebody.

JMTQp8lwXL3• 7 years ago

Because this industry is competitive with many employers, I have the luxury of (somewhat) prioritizing my personal values w.r.t my work. Not everyone has that.

throwaway2048• 7 years ago

I think a job at the baby grinding plant has opened up, pay starts at around 500k USD/y you interested?

apta3• 7 years ago

Because, in this case, you'd be playing a role in spreading destructive behavior in society. Unlike some other companies which have goods and bads, here we have a company that provides no good whatsoever.

goobynight2• 7 years ago

Any company big enough to be operating at scale has some software needs and not everyone is fulfilled by SaaS solutions.

bhouston• 7 years ago

Smokers switching to ecigs is a good thing. Significantly proved health outcomes.

But kids adopting flavored ecigs and beginning smoking is horrible.

So we need to limit ecigs to the first use case and minimize the second otherwise ecigs/vaping could be an overall net negative.

So I do strongly favor no advertising at all and no flavors or colors except mentol or something else which appeals to existing smokers.

least3• 7 years ago

Alternatively we can inform children about the risks of using e-cigarettes and let them make the decision on their own?

Existing smokers like the different flavors as well and it's definitely one of the appeals it has over smoking cigarettes.

EDIT: I'd like to make the point that I'm not a proponent of children making their own decisions as a child. We've already accepted as a society (generally) that children do not have the same agency as adults. I'm suggesting that people are allowed to inform children about the risks just as we do with smoking and drinking and allow them to make that decision when they are able to.

dx87• 7 years ago

I don't know if you've ever met a child, but informing them of risks and letting them make their own decisions isn't always the best idea. I don't know how many times I've been at restaurants and heard parents say "be careful, the plate is hot" followed by the sound of the kid crying because they didn't listen and grabbed the hot plate/food.

hawkedit2• 7 years ago

I'm curious why you feel that restricting all flavoring in e-cig juice would be a good thing. You do realize that would just push things underground and out of a somewhat regulated market even more... It doesn't take a rocket scientist to make their own flavored juice at home after ordering the supplies... Not to mention the disrupt that would have on local business with the tens of thousands of vape shops that have popped up across the country, all of which require the customer to be 18 or 21 years old..

6gvONxR4sf7o3• 7 years ago

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to roll a cigarette either, but I think most people buy them in stores.

Barrin92• 7 years ago

here in Germany distilling your own spirits is illegal (I think there's an exception for very small personal amounts), and yet I don't think I've ever seen some sort of early 20th century moonshine market.

I've seen these arguments about enforcement frequently but we're talking about modern governments here. If Uncle Sam wants to stop flavoured smoking they will be successful. They can go after online platforms that don't shut these exchanges down, they can go after individual sellers with harsh punishments, and so on.

I very much doubt the margins on vaping products are so high that someone is going to risk their neck over it. Menthol cigarettes in the EU were banned a few years ago and I can't remember having seen one in a long time.

stronglikedan• 7 years ago

Fruity flavors were a life-saver for me, because it allowed me to distance myself from tobacco flavor so much, that it made me nauseous when I would try to smoke a real cigarette again. It just so happens that the "something else which appeals to existing smokers", e.g., fruity flavors, may also be appealing to non-smokers. However, I don't see that as a strong enough argument to ban them.

glitcher• 7 years ago

I know several adults who vape, and none of them choose plain tobacco flavors. I understand that marketing to teens is horrible, but the argument that all flavored vapes should be banned doesn't make any sense to me. If Stoli decided they wanted to market blueberry vodka to teens, go after the company, don't ban all fruit flavored liquor!

cwkoss3• 7 years ago

My concern with 'fruity flavors' is the molecular diversity. Many of these compounds are considered safe for human consumption (edible) but under-researched when vaporized an inhaled, which has the potential for formation of novel unexpected compounds, especially in heterogenous solutions.

I think the risk from these compounds is likely an order of magnitude less than the risks of cigarette smoking, and these risks will decrease as we get more data on longer-term use for these compounds.

I read one study that found benzene formation in vapor from higher-watt devices, but not in lower ones. I think using minimum necessary power is a good harm mitigation measure until more data comes in, that would likely help with flavors as well.

Seems like stringent labeling requirements for vape juice would be a cheap win for regulators and consumers. Give us an MSDS with the exact constituents.

gimmeThaBeet• 7 years ago

I have a very mixed reaction to all the e-cigarette shenanigans.

There's part of me that feels like it's a health corollary to the Jevons Paradox, if you make nicotine delivery potentially less damaging, it would stand to follow you lower the risk barrier and might end up with more nicotine users than you started with.

I'm def not in high school anymore, and maybe for that reason, the messaging I've personally seen from Juul does is entirely different. Literally the only stuff I've seen from Juul in the wild has been,

* "If you weren't already smoking, don't use Juul" * "we support any effort to raise the minimum age of purchasing nicotine products to 21 (T21 laws)"

I certainly wouldn't be taken aback if this were just one face of a many-faced beast, and with the other hand they were trying to cultivate a new generation of customers.

But it's with a sort of bemused annoyance that the common refrain I've heard from activists and public policy folks ends up converging at "Juul should have never existed." The cynic in me thinks it wonderful if all our problems had the decency to never exist. It just seems aggravating of all issues, the wheels of the machine politic turn so freely for flavored e-cigarettes.

dcolkitt• 7 years ago

I've noticed a major cognitive bias most people have regarding vaping. Basically along the lines of "smoking's very bad for health, therefore vaping (or nicotine consumption) is probably pretty bad too".

Here's the facts. Smoking is bad because smoldering organic compounds are very damaging. It doesn't matter what is being burned, all smoke is bad in roughly equal proportion to the volume of smoke being inhaled. It's why sitting by a wood-burning fireplace does as much damage as a pack of cigarettes.

(As an aside, we generally don't see the same health problems with cannabis smokers as we do with tobacco smokers. That's primarily because cannabis smokers consume significantly less volume than tobacco smokers. A pack-a-day smoker is smoldering 140 grams of dried organic material. A very heavy cannabis user might go through 7 grams of high-THC weed per week.)

So the fact is we don't really know much about the long-term health consequences of vaping. It simply hasn't been widespread for long enough for us to gather any large-scale epidemiological data. It's possible it may be very harmful. It's also possible that it may be basically harmless.

But the fact that smoking is unhealthy tells us nothing about vaping. There are no smoldering organic compounds involved in vaping. Therefore if it is unhealthy it would be because of a totally separate mechanism. In general there are very very few human activities that are as unhealthy as smoking. Heavy smoking literally quadruples all cause mortality.

There are many many activities that push humans' physiological baseline. High-altitude living, exotic or restricted diets, mega-doses of vitamins, scuba diving, high salt consumption, high-dose hallucinogens, keeping a nocturnal schedule, heavy caffeine consumption, drinking too much or too little water, being a radiation worker, artificial sweeteners, heavy manual labor, tons and tons of synthesized dyes and chemicals. Most of them are basically harmless, and none of them have anywhere near the health impact of smoking.

It would quite unexpected if vaping just coincidentally happened to be one of the few human activities that had a smoking-magnitude effect. Is it possible? Sure. Is it likely? Not at all.

As for nicotine consumption, the balance of the evidence is that it's very slightly unhealthy at worse, and potentially beneficial for neurological health.[1]

[1]https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine

psyclobe• 7 years ago

I just managed to quit Juul's after a ~5 year binge. It costed me ~60 dollars a week or so and unlike cigarettes where you typically go outside and make a little event out of it, these little guys can be huffed anywhere, so that usually causes you to build a constant huffing habit. Your entire day is constantly revolving around this little device, it terrified me to realize that I needed some external device/chemicals just to feel normal every day.

Juul Labs CEO to Step Down

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