
Juul Labs CEO to Step Down - JumpCrisscross
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-25/juul-labs-ceo-to-step-down-amid-growing-vaping-backlash
======
AdmiralAsshat
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.

~~~
lazyguy2
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](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.

~~~
xphilter
"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.

~~~
moftz
There needs to be some more information out there as to what specifically is
causing this illness. Everyone is quick to lump all vapes together when there
are a ton of rumors that the ones making people sick/dead are
blackmarket/bootleg THC cartridges from China. For all of these illnesses and
deaths to come on so quickly, it seems more like a tainted product than the
typical PG/VG/flavoring mixture causing this. We already know smoking kills.
It kills way more people every day than have ever died from vaping. If we
aren't going to ban cigarettes too, then we need to regulate them both
equally. I don't think vape ads on TV are appropriate and Juul employees
visiting schools is definitely not good, regardless of whether or not the kids
are 18+. They can be used as smoking cessation but they can also just be used
as an alternative as compared to patches and gum which are really only good
for cessation.

~~~
juped
"Rumors" from e.g. the Minnesota department of public health

~~~
moftz
I hadn't seen anything official, only people saying it in comments so I didn't
want to imply it was a fact.

------
gimmeThaBeet
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
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](https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine)

------
bhouston
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.

~~~
stronglikedan
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.

~~~
cwkoss
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.

------
mfoy_
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.

~~~
vkou
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.

~~~
zosterops
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...](https://news.sky.com/story/nicotine-no-worse-than-cup-of-coffee-
report-10349589)

~~~
vkou
Quitting caffeine is as easy as a few days, maybe a week of feeling like shit.
Take an aspirin or two, and move on with your life.

Quitting nicotine is a fucking struggle.

It doesn't kill you, but it has negative impacts on your life, when you aren't
using. Addicts become really shitty to be around, when they haven't had their
hit for a few hours.

What exactly is the public benefit to getting children addicted to a substance
that is incredibly difficult to kick?

~~~
mathemagics
I'm also not forced to consume caffeine merely by standing next to you.

~~~
vokep
What is the actual quantity of nicotine in second hand vapor?

Most likely not very high.

~~~
mathemagics
Got any studies to back that up?

Seems to be high enough to feel the effect. Never experienced this by just
standing next to someone sipping coffee.

------
goatsi
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.

~~~
34679
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™.

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

~~~
34679
JUUL's competition is super cheap. Which is why JUUL/Phillip Morris will lobby
to have most of them regulated out of existence. You can get a bottle of the
same strength juice that's in a JUUL pod for the same price as a pack of pods.
But the bottle has 30mL and the pack has 2mL.

~~~
cwkoss
I'm someone who vapes, and I wouldn't mind more regulation on juices. Nicotine
is a very potent chemical, and concentrated solutions are effectively potent
poison. A swig from one of these bottles could easily kill you.

At minimum, I believe there should be labeling and quality controls standards,
and child-safety caps. A concentration limit may be sensible as well.

------
JMTQp8lwXL
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.

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

~~~
Crespyl
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.

------
throwaway857384
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
Confirmation bias? Better access to information?

~~~
throwaway857384
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.

------
psyclobe
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.

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

------
mfoy_
Outline: [https://outline.com/XZ7M3t](https://outline.com/XZ7M3t)

