Juul's campaign to raise the age of tobacco is more complicated than it seems – Mother Jones

On July 25, Juul, the $ 38 billion electronic cigarette business, appeared before the US House Watch Committee to explain its role in nicotine addiction among young people.

Juul has been introduced as a public health officer before Congress. "Our incentive is to help [smokers] reach their goal of smoking transition, "said James Monsees, a co-founder of the company. "From the moment Adam [Bowen] and I started the trip, our goal was clear: to help improve the lives of adult smokers. "

Still, the company had been pilloried the day before at the same legislative hearings for its marketing campaign which, according to the legislator, was intended to make teenagers pale.

At the hearing, Dr. Robert K. Jackler, a professor of medicine at Stanford and a tobacco researcher, testified that he discovered that Juul had copied the tactics of traditional tobacco advertisements for tobacco. "target young people". His research began after one of Juul's founders expressed gratitude for Stanford's database of traditional tobacco advertisements. "He said they were" very helpful "in designing Juul's advertising," Jackler said.

Juul was also criticized for sending a representative to a grade nine class in 2017 – a representative who said the nicotine USB key was "totally safe," according to a teenager who testified before the committee. The company said Mother Jones that he ended his education and youth prevention program after finding that his goal had been "misinterpreted".

The hearing was just one example of the growing problem of image that the company was trying to solve with a small army of lobbyists and a campaign to increase the legal age to own, buy and consume tobacco from 18 to 21 years. Juul has tried to present himself as a healthier option for smokers. According to experts and advocates of public health, Juul is only copying a strategy used by tobacco companies for decades: by asking for a regulation itself, they keep some control over the standards.

Part of the complication is that smoking cigarettes is so toxic that almost everything is better, even Juul. This less serious line of thinking about two ailments has led to academic debates on the harm reduction associated with vaping, and "the industry benefits," says Dr. Pamela Ling, a professor at the Center for Research and Innovation. 39, education on tobacco control. at the University of California-San Francisco. For example, Juul proclaims himself a "satisfactory alternative to the world's deadliest consumer product, cigarettes" to explain his desire to raise the age limit, and he argues research that positions flavored tobacco as useful for those who wish to switch from cigarette to steam, rather than addiction themselves. Kathleen Hoke, a law professor at the University of Maryland, is studying tobacco regulation.

In the past year, 12 legislatures passed age-old laws, including highly populated states like Texas and New York. Some are supported by organizations such as the American Lung Association. But many of them have entered these public institutions as model legislation from health care advocates transformed by tobacco companies, according to a report. United States today analysis of 21 proposed tobacco legislation. The problem is that Juul-supported bills sometimes contain additional provisions that, according to their fears, could undermine efforts to prevent teenagers from smoking, as a measure that could prevent stricter local enforcement of the laws. tobacco laws.

"In Virginia, Arkansas and Utah, [Juul] Rob Crane, president of the Preventing Tobacco Addiction Foundation, a group that advocates that the minimum age of tobacco buying be 21, has been swept by a horde of lobbyists "to help respect the" terrible and inapplicable orders on tobacco. "Bills lacked enforcement measures. Virginia law only punishes retailers, not tobacco companies, for small fines of up to $ 2,500. for three offenses, where a tobacco company representative even helped explain the legislation to the committee Arkansas law prohibits local governments from regulating tobacco sales A chapter of the Cancer Action Network cited in Utah, citing similar problems, even lobbied against the bill that would raise the age to 21. Local health advocates, who have fewer resources than Juul, are are found overwhelmed for regulations and enact them through the state legislatures. .

Now, four federal bills – two in the Senate and two in the House – propose raising the age of smoking to 21 years. Juul supports three, the most important of which is sponsored by Senator Tim Kaine (D-Virginia). and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky). The company has spent more than a million dollars lobbying from April to June of this year and has recruited a growing phalanx of lobbyists in Washington DC. They also engaged with the black legislators of the Democratic Party by hiring former NAACP President Ben Jealous, recruiting Reverend Al Sharpton, and publicly promoting initiatives such as a $ 7.5 million donation to a historically black medical school.

Although legislation to raise the legal age of smoking to 21 years may seem like a gesture to protect young people from adverse health effects, experts say it's more complicated than that. "We find that they want to put that forward to make it look like the good guy," says Hoke. "But they are not really trying. They do not expect it to really hurt their business. The amended legislation would have a "negligible" impact on smoking, she says. Without a dedicated application (which fluctuates with state budgets and is complicated by the Internet market), raising the age limit may not do much. By raising the age to 21 in this way, local governments could not adopt measures likely to change the use of adolescents, such as the ban on flavored tobacco.

"The tobacco companies will promote legislation that at first glance seems reasonable," said Ling. "But, somewhere in the back of the legislation, there are bad policies that undermine a good tobacco control policy." (Juul, for his part, states, "Ideally, each jurisdiction adopts its own tobacco legislation". but this is not always the case, given the state dynamics and the policy at the country level.In these situations, we continue to support the bills that pass the bill. age 21 and will continue to work with elected officials to strengthen legislation in future legislative sessions. ")

Discussing the exact policies in these bills can be tricky. Take the Kaine-McConnell bill that is making its way to the Senate. This includes changing an obscure measure that required states to change the legal age to sell tobacco at age 18 or lose federal funding. States began to comply. "Sales to children have dropped," said Crane. If the Kaine-McConnell bill is passed, the legal age will be reduced to 21 years. Then 32 states will be forced to update their local laws accordingly, and state governments across the country will all work on tobacco legislation at the same time, which makes health difficult. advocates with less funding to compete with the tobacco industry. "We're going to fight the industry – Juul, who recruited lobbyists like there was no tomorrow – on several fronts at once," Crane said.

To date, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Children has counted at least 480 local municipalities, counties, cities and hamlets that have passed 21 tobacco ordinances. "It was the secret sauce," Crane said. "We could not win rooms against a horde of lobbyists. But when I went to see a city councilor in Cameron, Missouri or Columbus, Ohio or San Francisco, I sat in front of a guy who was there. 39, the local orthodontist of the city council and the president of the PTA – well, we have never lost. "

Crane notes that if the Kaine-McConnell bill becomes law, it would not only allow Juul to lobby massively in dozens of states, but could also reverse the only tactics that he has found ways of Prevent youth smoking: local municipalities to pass bans.

At the same time, public health advocates who oppose legislation that would increase the age required to consume tobacco because of such concerns eventually seem "a little crazy," Ling said.

Juul launched his "switching" message in San Francisco, where the company is based. Last year, the city banned the sale of flavors and, in June, sales of electronic cigarettes were banned until full product licensing by the FDA. "This effective ban will bring back former adult smokers who have successfully turned their products into vapors into flammable cigarettes," Juul said. The company has invested more than $ 4.5 million in a voting initiative that could reverse this ban.

In May, Juul started collecting signatures for what appeared to be a initiative that calls for stricter enforcement of Tobacco21 laws on steam-based products. At the heart of this voting initiative is a clause that "cancels the ban on the sale of electronic cigarettes flavored by the city," writes on his blog Stanton A. Glantz, director of the Center for Research and Control on Tobacco, and guarantees "Juul will remain welcome in the city," he said, adding that the new regulation would "pre-empt and cancel" the existing regulation, thereby eliminating the progress already made on bans.

According to Ling, efforts designed to resemble the self-regulation proposed by big tobacco have often been the object of hidden backsliding. In 1994, the tobacco industry, faced with a large number of local laws regulating indoor smoking, submitted to the California legislature a proposal presented as a clean air, but against local ordinances to limit lost sales by legislating at the state level. After the huge 1998 Framework Regulation agreement – an agreement in which the tobacco industry agreed to pay billions of dollars a year and put an end to targeted marketing for young people after each state's attorney general brought legal action to cover smoking-related medical expenses – tobacco industry needed to create anti-smoking programs for teens. Tobacco companies used their punishment not to discourage smoking, but to "portray smoking as an adult choice," according to a research article written by Ling.

Programs "fail[ed] to discuss … the dangers of smoking for health, "she wrote, concluding that programs for youth in the tobacco industry had done" more harm than good ".

Juul gave his own sense to this well-used strategy to portray their capitalism as a moral. Silicon Valley aims to alternate the product on a false patina of the years of prosperity of the first technology, added Ling. "But in many ways, the product they've put on the market is the same thing they've been trying to sell for decades," namely nicotine.

In this way, Juul looks like many technology companies. It needed an already popular product, cigarettes, an advanced technology to create electronic cigarettes and present it as a whole new alternative to tobacco. She then used an under-regulated space – social media – to sell her product like crazy. (According to a congressional subcommittee, social media influencers have been paid to Juul to target children, although the company is no longer on social media because of its potential for attraction to young people.)

Now, Juul is at a stage that is also familiar to many technology companies: they have to pretend to have "changed" when regulation begins.