Week 6: How E-cigarettes Have Developed

Hey, everyone! Welcome to my Week 6 Senior Project Blog. I was originally planning on designing my informational posters this week, but I’ve decided to delay it while I get more data for my survey. So instead, this week I have been reading The Devil’s Playbook: Big Tobacco, Juul, and the Addiction of a New Generation, and I will end the week by reading Tobacco: Through the Smoke Screen.

Through my reading, I’ve had the opportunity to learn more about the rise of Juul, a type of e-cigarette. It contains fewer chemicals than a regular cigarette, which has led to it being marketed as less harmful. Additionally, rather than emitting smoke, Juuls emit a vapor and don’t leave ashtray residue. However, the most appealing aspect of Juul would probably be the candy, dessert, and fruit flavors that are in the nicotine pods. The founders of Juul have long marketed their product as a safer alternative to cigarettes and have claimed that the product helps people, as smokers can switch to their products to reduce the harm to their health. In reality, e-cigarettes have ATTRACTED many teens to tobacco products. A 2023 survey found that 7.7% of middle and high school students, or 2.13 million students, used e-cigarettes, and among those students, 89.4% used flavors.

It all began in 2005, when two graduate students at Stanford, Adam Bowen and James Monsees, decided to design electronic cigarettes called Ploom for their final thesis project. In 2007, they started a business called Ploom, and in 2015, the company was sold and its name changed to PaxLabs, where the Juul was created. At the time, scientists had already published research showing the detrimental impacts of cigarettes, so Bowen and Monsees decided to create a product that wouldn’t receive as much backlash. They studied previous tobacco companies and their attempts to make less harmful cigarettes, and they finally designed battery-operated vaporizers that turned liquid nicotine into vapor. Because these products were so new and had not been seen before, they were not restricted by any laws and grew greatly in popularity. There were no restrictions on advertisements, and they were seen in magazines, TV, and social media. Around 2015, Juul even bought ads on websites like Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, which served to attract the youth.

E-cigarettes came to be used much more than cigarettes, and this caused a vaping epidemic among young people, who were especially attracted to these flavors and believed e-cigarettes weren’t as harsh or as harmful as regular cigarettes. Many people recognized this problem and as a result, some legislation has been passed to ban these products. In January 2020, the FDA banned pre-filled vape pods, like Juul, but excluded refillable flavored vapes and disposable flavored vapes because of resistance from the tobacco industry. Some states have created or are working on creating their own legislation regarding flavored tobacco products, but the tobacco industry continues to fight for fewer restrictions. Overall, e-cigarettes have still had a very large, negative impact on the youth and have drawn in many people through the new flavors, design, and marketing of the products.

Although this information is troubling, I am glad that I have had the chance to research the tobacco industry and all its tactics so that I can spread awareness about tobacco products. I will be sure to use my learnings to design my informational posters, which I will be doing next week. Thanks for reading!

Sources:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7244a1.htm?s_cid=mm7244a1_w