We killed the cigarette and replaced it with mango-tasting nicotine puffs
This year, cryptic signs for something called Juul began appearing in the windows of the 7-Eleven on my block. On vacation in Miami, where smoking is still allowed in many clubs, I noticed a pretty young woman pull a Juul from her purse and lay it on the bar, next to her cocktail. This summer, I saw Juuls at a Fourth of July crab crack and Juuls on the city bus.
Juul, if you haven’t heard, has quietly become the most popular new way to smoke since the old coffin nail itself, claiming more than half of the booming market for electronic cigarettes.
Where early e-cigs tended to mimic cigarettes — and hilariously generated more smoke than a fog machine — the Juul is as far removed from a cigarette as you can get. A sleek little brick that looks like a USB flash drive, it flickers with coloured light, puffs discreetly and smells like nothing at all. It is the iPhone of smoking, and the kids are wild for it.
So, I needed one. I bought Juul from a neighbourhood head shop where the man behind the counter informed me that he sells so many of the things he can’t keep count, though it has nothing to do with marijuana. It plays to the same sensibilities, however: Juuling (yes, it’s a verb now) isn’t necessarily about a search for a high, but for an aura of cool.
Every generation discovers — or appropriates — a vice and polishes it to the appropriate social sheen. Juuling upstaged smoking, and on it goes, the generations grasping for signifiers and identities separate from the adults.
For the young, the Juul is this year’s incarnation of the fidget spinner.
Instagram is filled with models such as Bella Hadid, who is a tender 21, claiming to smoke mango, and girls who simply post brief videos of themselves puffing on Juuls. There are memes — so, so many memes — about the panic that sets in when your Juul goes missing, and kids stuffing their mouths with Juuls and emitting one massive vaporous cloud. On YouTube, just one blurry video showing you how to smack Juul into “party mode” had more than 100,000 views.
But Juuling, health professionals say, also carries the dangers of the death stick of the past. It is raising alarms by hooking youth on nicotine at a time when old-fashioned smoking has been hitting a steep decline. First, some basics. A Juul is nothing without its “pods,” tiny pure nicotine capsules flavoured like fruit or mint or “Virginia tobacco” (whatever that is). These give the device, and the user, the kick. (The Juulers, the man at the shop offers helpfully, really like the cucumber.)
For roughly $70, I take home a Juul and five “pods” — the nicotine equivalent of five packs of cigarettes. When I put it to my lips, it tastes faintly like an Andes mint and makes me feel deeply out of touch.
Over the next month, I take Juul to bars and puff flagrantly in front of bartenders. They don’t stop me, but they glare.
I hit Washington, D.C.’s trendiest, most aggressively hipster venues — like that new axe-throwing place — and don’t encounter a single other Juul. One night, I dig to the bottom of my purse and toss the device onto a patio table, triggering a flicker of coloured lights — white, lavender, pink, blue, green. (Party mode, apparently.) A friend takes a drag of his Marlboro 27 and grimaces.
“Is this that EDM thing the kids are always going on about?”
The secret to Juul’s controversial success may be a twist on the age-old story of smoking as an outlet for teenage rebellion. The popularity of Juul seems to grow in tandem with the uproar: Sales of Juul are up more than 700 per cent from a year ago, according to Nielsen data.
Schools across the U.S. say they are confiscating fistfuls of the things from their underage charges. Three lawsuits were recently filed against Juul Labs; each argues that users as young as 14 became addicted to Juul, and that the product was marketed as safe.
And last month on Capitol Hill, the American Association for Cancer Research convened a briefing on e-cigarettes’ exploding popularity with youth; the conversation revolved entirely around Juul.
“I’ve heard lots of stories from kids who’ve used Juul in front of teachers, and they think it’s so funny that their antiquated teacher doesn’t realize that it’s, in fact, an addictive drug that they’re using,” said Benjamin Toll, chief of tobacco cessation and health behaviours at the Hollings Cancer Center of the Medical University of South Carolina, who was on the panel.
When I ask her about the growth in the number of young vapers, Ashley Gould, chief administrative officer of Juul Labs, said that the flock of underage Juulers “was not anticipated and completely unexpected to us.”
The company, Gould said, is now working to “scrape” the internet of social media posts of young people using Juul, and the unauthorized sellers who happily provide them.
“No adult who has never used nicotine should ever use our product,” she added.
That doesn’t quite jibe with the marketing: In one ad produced by the company, it’s a young woman in a bomber jacket and crop top — not a leather-skinned 45-year-old trying to shed his 30-year dependence on Marlboros — coolly blowing smoke. The Virginia Slims glamazon has come a long way, baby.
American puffing peaked in 1970, when almost half of all adults smoked cigarettes. Smoking had been popularized by television and movies and celebrity. James Dean smoked. Marilyn Monroe smoked.
The feeling of subversiveness, the heady high of believing we were truly cool, helped lift the cigarettes to Americans’ lips; we kept doing it, despite the pervasive stink on our clothes and the tar that yellowed our teeth, because of nicotine, because it is addictive.
“Kids who’ve used Juul in front of teachers … think it’s so funny that their antiquated teacher doesn’t realize … it’s an addictive drug.” BENJAMIN TOLL HOLLINGS CANCER CENTER