[Dr. Proctor] We evolved lungs to breathe air.
[Dr. Jackler] The lungs have about a football field of surface.
They're huge, if you take all the little bubbles and lay them out.
[Dr. Lynn D'Andrea] If you could look at a lung, it's very pink and lacey.
And doctors say the only thing that should be in your lungs is air.
[Dr. Proctor] What goes into your lungs often stays in your lungs.
[Dr. D'Andrea] The lungs are fragile,
and so anything that gets inhaled besides air is worrisome.
[Dr. Glantz] The most addictive way to deliver a drug is to inhale it.
It goes to your brain in a few seconds, and you get a big hit.
[Dr. Proctor] The diabolical genius of this industry
is turning what essentially is a form of enslavement
to a product as addictive as heroin or cocaine…
into a form of liberty.
[Dr. D'Andrea] It was the July 4th weekend, 2019.
We thought it was going to be a pretty quiet… a pretty quiet weekend.
[Benes] I take a deep breath, and it hurts.
[Amiratta] It was so painful to speak, or even breathe.
I feel like I'm dying.
Three more kids came in. It just kept building.
There were hospitals across the country that were reporting this.
[reporter] Three young people in Illinois, and 11 teens and young adults in Wisconsin
have been hospitalized with severe lung disease.
What all had in common was that they had been vaping.
-[EKG beeping] -[reporters chattering]
-It's quite a story… -$38 billion valuation…
…$17 billion stake in San Francisco e-cigarette maker JUUL.
[Hoda Kotb] Christmas came early for employees of JUUL,
the popular e-cigarette maker.
They got a $2 billion bonus coming their way.
It'll be split among the company's 1,500 employees,
which breaks down to about $1.3 million each.
-Wow! -Secret Santa around the office.
-That's right. -$1.3 million, incredible.
[Gladstone] I was woken up by my mother.
"I just got a call from Bobby Levine."
She saw on the Today show
every single employee at JUUL is now a multi-millionaire.
So I look on the internet, I turn on the TV.
Sure enough, all of JUUL's employees woke up this morning millionaires.
Jumping up and down, like, "It happened! I'm a millionaire!"
[tweeting sound]
[Pierce] You are, according to valuation of your company, a billionaire.
And that's the club you want to be in
because that is truly rarefied air, even in the tech industry.
[Rougeau] We all piled into this big lunchroom.
[Gladstone] There was a lot of excitement.
[Zarem] Kevin, Adam, and James announced the Altria investment,
and they were of the mindset that this was a huge step for the company.
When they were breaking down how the bonus was structured, they were like,
"Everyone will get this much money." I'm like, "What?"
[Laudadio] So Kevin went through the numbers,
and then I went back to my desk and I figured it out. It's like, "Whoa."
[Zarem] And, of course, Adam and James became billionaires overnight.
[employees chattering]
It was an interesting room to be in. There was a lot of celebration.
But it was definitely a divisive sort of announcement.
[Gladstone] There were some people
that raised their hand at the all-hands and said, "Hey…
are you telling us that we're now owned by Big Tobacco?"
[Shah] It was shocking.
I could no longer turn to my friends and say,
"No, we're not Big Tobacco."
[Zarem] A lot of people thought this was going the wrong direction.
It didn't align with their values.
We were anti-Big Tobacco.
Yes, we sell nicotine products, but we're not like them.
[Walker] We hated Big Tobacco.
That hate was very much a unifying part of our mission.
It's something that motivated us,
and all of a sudden it was like, "Now we are Big Tobacco."
Kevin came up, and essentially he gave a presentation to pull his team back.
The reason why this happened is we said, "Okay, tell you what."
"You want to invest in our company? You want to buy us?"
"We'll take all the money that it would require to buy us,
and we're going to give you 35%."
[Casselman] They were going to put an advertisement for JUUL
inside each and every Altria brand cigarette package.
That's probably the best direct-to-consumer marketing
that we could ever get.
Altria would provide legal and regulatory support,
as well as sales and marketing support.
[Zarem] We were actually taking over shelf space.
Instead of having eight slots of cigarettes,
it would be 4 slots of cigarettes and 4 slots of JUUL.
[Gladstone] They were gonna allow us access to their email database.
If you want to reach adult smokers, who has a bigger database than Altria?
They wouldn't control the company,
so that made me feel a lot better about the investment.
They were also committing, by 2050, to get rid of combustion completely.
Who in their right mind would ever agree to any of those things,
let alone all those things?
Someone who knows they lost.
[Walker] The three of them turned the tide, even for me,
in a way that I had not anticipated that they would.
The way that it was positioned was that this partnership with Altria
could help us accomplish a huge part of our mission.
Altria had to believe that JUUL not only was becoming the thing,
but that it would overtake cigarettes.
[Gladstone] This is them admitting defeat.
We had struck a blow to the Goliath.
They were kowtowing to us now.
[Gladstone] JUUL's ended cigarettes. They're admitting it.
"It's just a phase-out." They're switching to us.
That's a pretty powerful explanation
that that sounded like the best thing I've ever heard.
And more than welcome, any of you,
to send out questions, concerns, to all of us.
We would love to answer them personally for all of you.
A lot of people walked out of that meeting not knowing what to think.
I didn't think that I could stay,
because if I accepted the money, it was like blood money.
And I thought a bit about…
how my dad would perceive it.
He had been a smoker my whole life,
and he ultimately died of lung cancer.
I essentially came to the conclusion that
if Altria is gonna help us do what we've been trying to do anyway,
then it's for good.
So that was how I justified it.
But I will say it was not an easy…
conclusion for me to come to.
I still feel weird about it.
[Zeller] When Gottlieb and I learned,
Gottlieb being the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration,
that, unknown to us,
those companies were in secret negotiations for a $12.8 billion deal,
we were incredulous.
Both companies had engaged in disingenuous behavior with us,
and we felt betrayed.
[Ducharme] It seems to Gottlieb, JUUL and Altria
were trying to undermine the FDA,
preparing to sell even more of the vaporizer
that was most popular among teenagers.
[Zeller] It called into question the integrity of the individuals.
But I've learned over time
to be very skeptical about what comes out of the mouths
from anybody in the tobacco industry, including e-cigarette manufacturers.
For us to successfully fulfill our mission of helping adult smokers
we must be trusted. And we must earn that trust.
That starts with action, not words.
We thank Commissioner Gottlieb for his leadership in this area,
and we look forward to working with the FDA
to solve this issue on an industry-wide basis.
I questioned just how genuine any statement from the head of JUUL was
about sharing a common goal with regulators
about reducing youth use of their products.
[Berkman] Big Tobacco never went away.
They play the long game,
and they must replenish their customers,
or they will put themselves out of business.
The parents of this country are fed up.
You're not taking this generation. Eff you.
We're going to make it really hard for you to continue addicting kids.
My daughter was 15 and a sophomore in high school
when she first tried vaping with some girlfriends.
She's been addicted to the JUUL products since she was about 13, 14 years old.
Please tell the FDA now is the time to put our children's health
over the profits of Big Tobacco…
Parents were sending thousands of letters to FDA
saying, "Get rid of the flavors, get rid of online sales."
"We want action. Go after this company."
We're trying to protect kids, and I think,
"Now we just have to get the FDA to do that too, and we'll be all set."
[Zeller] This was becoming an increasingly political issue,
so Gottlieb was taking all of this heat
for trying to implement the framework that we'd come up with in 2017,
where there was a place for alternative and less harmful products.
But then, we get this disastrous data
on the explosion of e-cigarettes with children and adolescents
in 2017 and 2018.
At some point, the youth use of those products becomes so intolerable
that they have no redeeming health value,
and we'll have to sweep the market of those products, including JUUL…
[Ducharme] Scott Gottlieb changed the deadline
for when companies like JUUL
had to submit their Premarket Tobacco Product Applications,
and if they couldn't prove that JUUL was appropriate for public health,
it could be removed from the market,
and the company would have to go out of business.
[Walker] People jumped on the bandwagon because it's Big Tobacco all over again.
"We thought we'd eradicated this."
I think that was the big narrative that drew people in.
I can see how the way the media portrayed it,
it was like, "It's Big Tobacco all over again."
[Rougeau] I would have conversations with a stranger,
and I was always worried that if I told him I worked for JUUL,
it'd be like, "How does it feel working getting nicotine to kids?"
[Casselman] Someone came up to me at a party, not knowing it was me,
like, "There are a bunch of people from that fucked-up company JUUL here,
that made all this money and think they're hot shit now." And I was like…
"Huh."
This was misreported pretty broadly about how much money people made.
[Zarem] Somebody wrote that when Altria invested $2 billion,
they were splitting it among the 1,500 employees evenly.
So there were all these people on LinkedIn being like… [clears throat]
…"Do you need help managing your millions?"
And I was laughing. I was like,
"I literally just made enough to pay off my parking tickets."
[Rougeau] It was unfair how the media was portraying JUUL.
[Eschenbach] The marketing of that acquisition
could have been done better
to portray the real benefit
that this would allow JUUL to reach more older smokers
that are smoking and killing themselves,
and have a much more positive effect on the health of the nation.
[Shah] The Altria deal made it even harder to earn public trust,
and if you lose the public's trust,
you lose the permission to operate, to be a business.
It's easy to judge the company. The mistrust is understandable.
Big Tobacco did some really messed-up things,
so we're not even starting from a good place.
We have to try and… make up for that.
The onus is on us.
We better get to work.
[Taylor] There was a sense of urgency, without a doubt.
They said, "We want you to be
the Director of Product for Youth Prevention."
"If this company is going to survive, you have to solve this."
They wanted me to focus on the retail end of it.
Underage kids going into a convenience store
and making a purchase without being carded.
But as much as every retail store can say, "Yeah, we'll make sure to card,"
there was no technology or anything to guarantee that would happen.
So we built age verification technology,
where you have to swipe a driver's license to complete a purchase.
JUUL was doing something no other company was doing.
Anheuser-Busch wasn't telling all their retailers,
"You have to add age verification."
The founders and the company truly believe that they're saving lives,
and children getting access to this product
is only distracting what the company's vision is.
[Walker] The mission was so important.
I was a smoker. I knew what the product had done for me,
I knew what it could do for others.
So with all the negative publicity around JUUL
and the perception that JUUL was causing all of this harm,
there was this whole group of people that JUUL was helping.
We started to hear from people with real stories.
We used that database of stories to cast our commercials,
and what became the Make the Switch campaign.
Popped a pod in it, took a couple of puffs,
and I was surprised at how similar it was to a cigarette.
I felt a sense of pride that I was able to let go of that habit.
I wanted to help other people who had similar stories as me
get off of cigarettes.
[Walker] We didn't pay them. They weren't actors.
There was this desire to be very deliberate
in how we portrayed ourselves.
"Make the Switch."
As a marketer, it's the simplest message there is.
If they thought that by Make the Switch,
they could put the toothpaste back in the tube, they were fooling themselves.
It was too late.
Millions of children are already addicted to e-cigarettes,
and millions more will follow if we don't act.
This is what I think sometimes you see happen with companies.
If they perceive that public officials are timid,
they take advantage of it.
From my perspective,
JUUL was preying on the timidity of the FDA,
and as a result, it was left to San Francisco to do their job for them.
We're introducing today groundbreaking legislation
at the Board of Supervisors
that would prohibit the sale in San Francisco
of any e-cigarette that has not undergone FDA pre-market review…
[Mintz] That was a bill that Parents Against Vaping fought hard for,
and that was a huge victory.
There's no reason that our kids should be used as human guinea pigs
for the e-cigarette experiment.
Banning vaping in San Francisco's a fucking travesty.
[Charles] This product helped people like myself get off of cigarettes,
but suddenly, it's more difficult to purchase.
Meanwhile, the thing that I've wanted to quit for so long is readily available.
It… seems kind of ass-backwards.
Interesting that their hometown just banned the product.
It is fundamentally retaliatory, short-sighted, and political.
Some say that this is Nanny State-like and puritanical.
I don't agree with that.
You just have to have been approved, as required under the law,
before you sell in San Francisco. Pretty simple.
[Marc Gunther] Now the sides were drawn.
It was the good guy crusaders, the liberal democrats,
against Big Tobacco.
Kids in nice prep schools in New York, Silicon Valley,
have taken up these e-cigarettes, and there was kind of a moral panic.
These are parents with money, these are parents with influence,
these are parents with political connections.
-Thank you for having me. -We saw each other this weekend.
I told Dorian I would cover it, and here we are…
[Gunther] It's a classic example
of a narrow interest group using their political clout
in a way that does not benefit the broader good.
People say it was only rich white kids. I don't think that's entirely accurate.
We represent millions of parents
whose lives have been upended by the youth vaping epidemic.
And there's only anecdotal evidence that adults are helped by e-cigarettes,
but there's proven evidence that kids are harmed.
When you know someone is harming children, how do you look away?
[Raja Krishnamoorthi] The summer of 2019, I saw JUUL marketing everywhere.
I also started hearing from my own children about this.
We were in a youth vaping epidemic.
28% of high schoolers were vaping,
almost 11% of middle schoolers were vaping.
JUUL was everywhere.
The biggest concern that I was hearing from parents is that
JUUL was marketing directly to their kids.
We first asked JUUL for any materials
surrounding the sales and marketing of these devices.
They basically slow-walked us.
And then at some point, Kevin Burns, the CEO of JUUL,
actually tried to go over my head to my chairman,
and Elijah Cummings said to Mr. Burns,
"If you fuck with my people, I will nail you to a cross."
JUUL, at that point, produced 55,000 documents to us.
And the documents were so damning
in terms of showing exactly how they were using social media influencers,
and that there was no evidence to support a lot of their claims
that JUULs were safer than combustible cigarettes.
That's when we decided, "We need to bring these folks in to explain themselves."
We asked for James Monsees to actually testify
because we really wanted to hear from the founder of JUUL under oath.
I felt badly for James as a person and as a friend,
but it was time for us to be public
in responding to everyone's valid concerns.
Good afternoon. Sorry for the delay. The subcommittee will come to order.
[Krishnamoorthi ]The atmosphere when James Monsees entered the room was tense.
The room was packed.
You had all these anti-youth-vaping advocates.
Mr. Monsees, do you swear that the testimony…
[Ducharme] In just under 15 years,
James had gone from a Stanford graduate student presenting his thesis
to defending the product that resulted from that thesis
in front of Congress.
This was a high-pressure situation.
He was fighting for the life of his company.
[Taylor] Everybody in the office was either in a conference room
with it on the TV,
or on their laptops with headphones.
You know this is going to be a defining moment.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
We need to work together to make sure
that no underage consumers use this product.
We want to get on to the business of eliminating cigarettes and saving lives.
[Shah] He was trying to implore, "Let's work together to figure this out."
And they turned around and said, "You're a monster."
JUUL began developing a pod to deliver more nicotine to the blood.
Is that accurate?
Uh… I'm not sure what you're referring to.
Mind-boggling that you don't know the answer.
How many are available today?
I… I don't know--
[Rashida Tlaib] If you say you don't know something, but you do,
it's the same thing as a lie.
Do you agree that the ad conveys that your product
can help smokers quit smoking cigarettes?
-This is the pattern of action-- -You try to get around FDA regulations.
[Ducharme] The vibe in the room that day was clearly
that JUUL was responsible for a health crisis
and should be held accountable for that.
[Krishnamoorthi] Here I was, watching this billionaire founder
telling the truth in some ways, but then not being candid in other ways.
People did not have the stomach or appetite
to let them continue doing what they were doing.
That's why you saw so much anger at the hearing.
[Mark DeSaulnier] I just want to tell you…
You, sir, are an example to me of the worst of the Bay Area.
You're nothing but a marketer of a poison,
and your target has been young people. I yield back.
I believe that it's the government's responsibility to protect children.
This hearing is adjourned.
That's why we made it very clear to JUUL, our kids are not for sale.
[Michelle Minton] It's easy for politicians to say
they're protecting kids by taking on Big Tobacco.
But at the end of the day, they're standing between smokers
and a potential life-saving route away from smoking.
I don't see it as political theater,
I see it as the proper and judicious use of a government organ.
Holding liable and accountable those who do misdeeds.
[Taylor] Everyone at the company was very focused on,
"We need to take charge of youth prevention."
"We can't just let the government figure it out."
We are spending 80 hours a week
doing nothing but thinking about teen vaping and how to solve it.
And I remember thinking, "We can only go up from here."
[Benes] I vaped a lot. It never left my hand.
It showed, for sure.
I looked… dead,
and it's because I was constantly intaking something that wasn't air.
The end of my senior year is when the progressive symptoms began happening.
It was very gradual, so I took it as, "You're just sick."
It wasn't big until…
every day got worse.
The first symptom I had was slight throat pain.
Next day, further down to the chest,
and it just went downhill from there.
I was in so much pain that I had to crouch because the deep breaths, I couldn't do.
A step hurt to take, and I could not eat anything.
If I did, it would come right back up.
I was told I looked like a walking skeleton.
I said to my mom, "I feel like I'm dying. Like, genuinely, I feel like I'm dying."
Going to the hospital was a very big blur, but…
I remember waking up in an ICU bed, with my family by my side, um…
[exhales]
[gasps]
It was just a really hard experience to go through, you know…
You don't know what's going on,
and you're so sick to a point where you're in your own little world of pain.
And I was going through respiratory failure,
so I essentially could have died in that moment.
[D'Andrea] I was on call that weekend at Children's Wisconsin,
and we thought it was going to be a pretty quiet weekend,
but by the time we realized we had four, and probably five, of these kids,
all of them with the same symptoms,
fever, cough, shortness of breath, and fatigue…
this was just not coincidental.
And when antibiotics weren't working, then it was,
"Let's move on to the next step and try to figure this out."
And what all five of the teens had in common
was that they had been vaping.
A children's hospital in Wisconsin is sounding an alarm
about serious health problems linked to vaping.
[reporter] Eight teenagers were admitted just this month with serious lung damage.
A fourth death has been reported from a severe lung illness
linked to vaping.
[reporter 2] Six deaths have been confirmed
in California, Illinois, Indiana…
[reporter 3] 43 confirmed cases…
[reporter 4] 69 confirmed cases of hospitalizations…
[reporter 5] 127 people in 15 States are seriously ill with lung damage…
[D'Andrea] It was eventually known as EVALI, which stands for
"E-cigarette or Vaping Product Use-Associated Lung Injury."
This was related to vaping. That was all we knew.
The CDC and others are racing to figure out why.
[Amiratta] I was with my friend, and I told her,
"I keep on feeling this sharp pain in my chest."
It's almost like a needle, plucking at my chest once in a while."
We go over the children's hospital.
I think they're going to do an X-ray or an EKG
and tell me, "Everything's okay. Here's a Tylenol."
And then a team of surgeons run into this room, screaming at me to wake up,
saying, "We need to rush you into surgery. Your lung collapsed."
I said, "Can I call my dad?"
They said, "You can, but he's not gonna be here in time for what we have to do."
I hear the tube go into my chest,
and it sounded like branches being stepped on.
[EKG beeping]
Yeah, sorry.
[tweeting sound]
And I thought, "If I'm gonna die, I'm gonna record everything."
"Everyone will know how I went out."
That's when things started to take off.
I remember being overwhelmed
with the amount of people that were flooding my messages.
I've never seen anything like it before.
People were sending me videos of them destroying their vapes and JUULs.
[Sweeney] A lot of my friends wanted to quit out of just being scared.
All the headlines said it was linked to JUUL,
and with so many people getting sick, I think it really caused a panic.
[Amiratta] The only goal I have now is to spread the word
and make sure no one has to go through this again.
[Zarem] There were huge protests outside of the office.
That's scary as an employee
because I didn't want to be a part of a company
that had a connotation that was associated with killing people.
I don't think anyone would want to be a part of that.
-We are taking our lives back. -[crowd cheering]
[Gladstone] I'm getting rotten eggs thrown at me. "Yo, kid killer!"
I realized real fast,
if I go anywhere with anything that says "JUUL,"
I might get beaten.
[chanting] JUUL is getting richer while kids are getting sicker!
I thought that JUULing was safer
than smoking regular cigarettes. I was wrong.
[Rougeau] It was like a wave had swept over, and everyone was like,
"I don't know if I want to vape anymore."
[Tony Dokoupil] JUUL Labs CEO Kevin Burns.
He's responding to the growing number of breathing illness cases
in people who vape.
I can't imagine we had the data to support
that we're selling a product that is damaging to the American public,
and we had that data, that we'd continue to sell that product.
I ask is because the tobacco industry doesn't have a great track record
when it comes to telling the truth to Americans about what they're selling.
Do you understand why people find it hard to trust you? You also sell nicotine.
Sure. Sure.
It's a lot of association that comes with that,
in terms of being in nicotine business. I understand.
[coughs]
[Zarem] People came to me and said, "Robbie, could that happen to me?"
I didn't necessarily know myself.
JUUL was such a young product,
we didn't have that ten-year data to say definitively that it was not the issue.
…as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
says that it has identified a chemical of concern
in the deadly vaping outbreak.
[newscaster] Vitamin E acetate may be linked to the national outbreak
that sickened thousands across the United States.
They collected all of these bronchoscopy samples,
and vitamin E was found in the vast majority of them.
It's a thicker liquid, sort of like a mineral oil,
which is why inhaling it causes so many problems in the lungs.
[Gladstone] Vitamin E oil looks just like THC.
You can get it right at a drugstore.
You can take empty, old discarded cartridges
and fill them with vitamin E oil,
and say that they're THC.
It had nothing to do with JUUL.
[Benes] For me, it didn't take very long before JUULing got old,
and I was like, "Oh, let's try something different."
THC is a whole 'nother world.
The flavors, the holographic designs on their boxes,
tailoring to what we wanted to see. Everyone had them.
I thought to myself, "It must be safe, right?"
[sighs]
[reporter] Brothers Tyler and Jacob Huffhines
sat at the same table in court Thursday,
charged with manufacturing
tens of thousands of illegal THC vape cartridges.
[Walker] We as a brand had problems with counterfeit products.
You can take JUUL and put any pod in it that you want.
It's what's in the cartridge that is what is going to cause harm to you,
not the JUUL itself.
[reporter] Good news for JUUL that the scrutiny now is going to land on
black market THC as opposed to teens, who are vaping from a JUUL.
[Conley] These people weren't using JUUL
or using conventional nicotine vaping products,
but that didn't get out in the media.
Even though this lung illness outbreak is apparently tied to THC,
it doesn't matter. In people's minds, it's all the same, it's vaping…
[Pierce] Even when it comes out that, actually, the problem is not JUUL,
the narrative that JUULing is bad for you becomes really hard to shake.
[Taylor] Maybe they wouldn't bring up JUUL's name,
but the videos that they were using
and the background imagery were all JUUL products.
So, psychologically, people at home
were connecting these tragic circumstances to JUUL.
News companies aren't going back and saying,
"By the way, JUUL didn't cause any of those deaths."
[Lorenz] Fact checks never go as viral as the lie.
People read the headline, not the article,
and once that headline is in their mind, that's what they'll believe.
[Pierce] Being the biggest in your space is dangerous
because when people need a story to tell, they will tell it about you.
What we don't know may, in fact, really hurt us…
[Dr. Proctor] What gets attention is very much a product of the media.
It can create genuine concern, it can create false concern.
JUUL got unfairly blamed
for these diseases caused by something else.
Even after it started to become clear
that most EVALI cases were linked to vitamin E acetate,
the CDC seemed very hesitant to clear JUUL's name.
What we're recommending is,
if you're concerned about your health risks
in light of this investigation, that you consider
not using e-cigarettes or vaping products…
To some people, that seemed like
the CDC was taking this as an opportunity to make people quit vaping
whether it was because of JUUL or not.
North Carolina suing the e-cigarette maker JUUL.
The Office of the Attorney General
is launching an investigation into JUUL Laboratories…
A comprehensive lawsuit…
President Trump proposing a ban on the sale of most flavored e-cigarettes.
We're using the power of the Minnesota Attorney General
to bring a lawsuit against JUUL Labs
on behalf of the state and the people of Minnesota.
Everything was coming at us everywhere, all the time.
It was like, "Do we need one more thing? We're trying so hard here."
[Ducharme] New York, Michigan, Massachusetts,
they were going to take all flavored vaping products off the market.
People say JUUL is toxic.
Is it?
The product or the company?
And he was on television, and Kevin came off looking disingenuous.
People say the long-term effects of vaping are not known. That's true.
That's true. That's a true statement.
Then how can you sell it every day?
Aren't you selling first and asking questions later?
We think we have a product…
[Gladstone] It didn't present well.
It was believed that he hurt the company and reputation more than he helped it.
[Gunther] All of this together has led to this terrible misperception
about the dangers of vaping.
More than half, perhaps as many as 75% of Americans,
think that e-cigarettes are more dangerous
or as dangerous as combustible tobacco.
Now, there is no reputable scientist, not one, who would tell you that's true.
We know more bad things about e-cigarettes today
than we did five years ago.
There are many adverse health effects of e-cigarettes.
The machine is detecting a higher velocity of flow through these vessels.
[Dokoupil] The animals' arteries stiffened almost as much as those exposed
to cigarette smoke over the same time.
One has to be really careful to generalize from animals to humans.
We did one of the first studies of the toxins in e-cigarettes,
and we found that it had almost none of the carcinogens in cigarettes.
[Dokoupil] For about two hours,
the NYU team simulated smoking four packs of cigarettes.
Oh, the aroma. Do you smell that?
The differences were plain to see.
-So this right here, this is tar. -Yes.
The vapor from a coffee-flavored e-liquid, not so much.
There's a little dampness.
-Smells like coffee. -Yes.
Millions of people around the world using e-cigarettes,
there is not one documented death from an e-cigarette.
They're probably less carcinogenic than a cigarette.
But that's like saying jumping out of the 15th story
isn't as dangerous as jumping out of the 50th story.
[Zeller] It's not black and white. Both sides need to acknowledge that
and try to figure out a way to have some kind of common grounds.
But obviously that hasn't happened.
It's not surprising that the public health community
is divided on this.
They are so desperate for a genuine solution,
and have been fooled so often by low tars, and lights, and ultra lights, and filters.
That has led to suspicion, rightly or wrongly,
that even when something truly safer comes along,
how can we trust this industry?
What they're united on is that
the cigarette is the world's deadliest product.
We need to find some exit from that.
Is JUUL the great savior,
or is this just the next new gimmick?
Darsana Capital has cut JUUL's valuation by more than a third.
[Ducharme] 2019 was a disastrous year for JUUL, financially.
From week to week, they could see the numbers falling.
There is a major shake-up underway this morning
at e-cigarette giant JUUL Labs.
The company's CEO, Kevin Burns, is being replaced.
[Taylor] There was an all-hands meeting, and it was short and sweet.
"I'm going to spend more time with my family. I'm out."
I don't think so.
He was fired. Come on, spend more time with his children?
It was announced that he had picked his replacement,
and that it was K.C. Crosthwaite.
Who the heck is K.C.? I had never heard of him. I didn't know who he was.
Altria.
Philip Morris.
[Shah] Of course, so many of us feeling suspicious.
Big Tobacco exec coming in.
[Taylor] To a lot of people, it felt like this was always in the plan.
People were very upset.
[Taylor] Like, "This is our CEO? I can't work here anymore."
[Shah] He talked a lot about if we wanted to achieve the mission,
we needed to have public trust.
And a lot of us were like, "Yeah, no shit."
"This is why we were suspicious of you and the Altria deal."
The fundamental thesis of our company is not changing…
It's like none of the things we were promised ever came to fruition,
and the things everybody would have feared did start to happen.
[Casselman] When K.C. took over,
there were people who came in who were tobacco executives.
They had been working for this company that I considered to be the root of evil.
[Zarem] A lot of the original people that were
at the start-up at the beginning had left.
Neither James nor Adam was playing a key role in JUUL by this point.
And now, with someone from Altria coming in,
they were even more marginalized within the company.
K.C. Crosthwaite decided to move James and Adam
into what he called a "Founders Office."
[Taylor] No such thing as a Founders Office. Never heard that term.
It came across as they're being pushed out.
[Casselman] K.C.'s directive was "Right JUUL's Path,"
and Adam and James' influence was seen as a distraction from that.
[Ducharme] Adam made the decision that he was ready to leave JUUL.
There was no big announcement.
He was ready to put the JUUL chapter behind him.
And not long after, James sent a company-wide memo.
[Shah] That was the turning point. Old JUUL was gone.
[Gladstone] We believed that this was going to change the world for the better,
and to see it reduced to where it was, puppet-mastered by Big Tobacco…
It was just too much for him to bear.
[Rougeau] James was seeing JUUL become something he didn't envision it to be,
and it was like, "Maybe this is the best time to walk away."
[Casselman] I felt badly for him
because it had been something he worked so tirelessly on,
and it was such a big part of his identity.
[Ducharme] James' departure was the last step in its transition
to a company that looked fairly indistinguishable
from the tobacco industry that it had originally sought to disrupt.
[Monsees] You initially think you're saving the world,
and then all of a sudden, people are saying, "No, you're the devil."
Is it even possible to make a safe cigarette?
The ultimate tragedy in the tortured story of JUUL
is, wow, they had succeeded where every predecessor had failed.
They had succeeded with technology
that more efficiently delivered the nicotine into the lungs
without having to burn tobacco leaves and inhale tobacco smoke.
The tragedy isn't the product that they produced,
the tragedy is that they then engaged in advertising, marketing, and promotion
coupled with a product
that did a better job of delivering an addictive drug that appealed to kids,
whether they intended it or not.
And by doing that, they blew up all the progress that was being made.
That is the ultimate tragedy.
[Mildenhall] JUUL will always go down as the case study
of when a company moves fast,
it breaks things, and cannot recover as a result.
The mission was perverted by an incredible,
astronomical potential for wealth.
It was greed. Pure, unadulterated greed.
[Monsees speaking]
[Dr. Proctor] "Fuck it, ship it" may work well
if we're talking about an iPhone or a toaster,
but it's not really appropriate when we're talking about
chemicals going into the lungs.
[Eschenbach] If I had a crystal ball
and could have seen the underage usage take off like it did,
I'd have done something to stop it.
But none of us have crystal balls.
People say, "Our products are being used in ways we didn't anticipate."
It's like, "You should have, that's your job."
"You should have anticipated those things and solved them,
and otherwise, you should not have put these out
in front of thousands, millions, billions of people."
[Minton] It was the perfect news story, guaranteed to get you views
guaranteed to get you clicks.
No one could stop talking about it and doing their advertising for them.
Even this documentary is doing it right now.
We're going to show the Vaporized campaign to potential teenage users.
JUUL Labs isn't Big Tobacco.
We are here to eliminate its product, the cigarette.
It's political theater. Show upset moms that he's got this issue under control.
Adults make their own decisions. They have developed brains.
But our kids have to be protected.
As a vaper, who is standing up for me?
We can't completely help 35 million adults,
and completely ignore protecting our teens.
But it's not either/or, it's both/and.
So we have to keep our eye on the prize.
[Casselman] Adam and James demonstrated vaping is an alternative.
You will see your grandmother finally quit smoking.
You will understand why this is important.
[vaping sound]
[Sweeney] They better use me as a test study,
'cause been doing it from day one.
One reason why I haven't really tried to quit yet
is because I haven't wanted to.
Right now I'm 24, and I like to go out with my friends,
and it's just not something I feel like I need to change in my lifestyle yet.
["Mouthful of Diamonds" by Phantogram playing]
♪ Wake up ♪
♪ You're getting high on your own supply ♪
♪ Oh, baby ♪
♪ You're still alive When you could have died ♪
♪ Oh ♪
♪ The world is not around because of you ♪
♪ You know I'm not around because of you ♪
♪ You've got a mouthful of diamonds ♪
♪ And pocketful of secrets ♪
♪ I know you're never telling anyone ♪
♪ Because the patterns They control your mind ♪
♪ Those patterns take away my time ♪
♪ Hello, goodbye ♪
♪ Wasted ♪
♪ You tell the truth When you could've lied ♪
♪ And troubles ♪
♪ Are on the rise 'Cause you're in disguise ♪
♪ Oh ♪
♪ And if it isn't me ♪
♪ Then pack your bags and leave ♪
♪ I wish I could believe blue devils Won't take you back ♪
♪ Out to the salty sea ♪