F.D.A. Seizes Documents From Juul Headquarters



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The Food and Drug Administration conducted a surprise inspection of the headquarters of the e-cigarette maker Juul Labs last Friday, carting away more than a thousand documents it said were related to the company's sales and marketing practices.

The move, announced on Tuesday, was tested by the United States, which controls 72 percent of the e-cigarette market in the United States. The F.D.A. Said deliberately targeted minors as consumers.

"The new and highly disturbing data on the use of these drugs is a very common finding of the epidemic of regular nicotine use among teens," the F.D.A. said in a statement. "It is vital that we take action to understand the particular appeal of, and ease of access to, these products among kids."

F.D.A. officials described the surprise inspection as a follow-up to a request for the agency made for Juul's research and marketing data in April. Kevin Burns, Juul's chief executive officer, said the company had already handed over more than 50,000 pages of internal documents to the F.D.A. in response to that request.

"We want to be part of the solution, and we believe it will work," he said.

In recent months, the F.D.A. Dr. Scott Gottlieb, said that he had reached "epidemic proportions."

The number of high-school students who used e-cigarettes in the past 30 days has risen roughly 75 percent since last year to about three million, according to preliminary unpublished data, confirmed by the F.D.A. Dr. Gottlieb has repeatedly noted that the candy-like names and flavors of many vaping liquids seem intended to attract younger users.

A RAND Corporation study of 2,039 Californians from ages 16 to 20 beginning in 2015 through 2017, released Tuesday, offered new evidence for concern about teenage vaping. Published in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research, the report said that as teenagers who used e-cigarettes grew older, which were more dangerous, as well.

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