Juul’s path to success: Innovation and addiction

At their peak, cigarettes were considered sexy and sophisticated - Cary Grant's lighting of Eva Marie Saint's cigarette, on a train in “North by Northwest” (1959), was sultry affirmation of tobacco's eminence. But government warnings about cigarettes, combined with public awareness campaigns, restrictions on advertising and billion-dollar lawsuits against tobacco companies, took their toll. Smoking in the United States has been in decline for 50 years, representing a hard-won public health victory.

Which makes the ascendance of e-cigarettes all the more infuriating, particularly because they appeal to the very group - teenagers — that anti-tobacco advocates most wanted to protect.

What happened? That’s the question Jamie Ducharme tackles in “Big Vape: The Incendiary Rise of Juul.” A journalist who wrote about vaping for Time, Ducharme depicts Juul as a trailblazing innovation that sought to disrupt Big Tobacco

but instead became its partner - and in the process realized staggering success: Juul Labs, according to Ducharme, reached a $10 billion valuation faster than any other company in history.

A sweeping business narrative "Big Vape" is not. But Ducharme provides a balanced, methodical account of how an addictive new smoking product with unknown health hazards became ubiquitous in American high schools.

While most investigations of cigarette companies have clear villains and heroes, "Big Vape" presents

Juul's founders as conflicted figures who defy easy moral judgment.

Adam Bowen and James Monsees met as graduate students at Stanford University in the early 2000s. They were smoking buddies, and, unable to quit their habit, they designed an e-cigarette for a class project. They promised that it would retain the pleasures of smoking without the same carcinogenic risks, and their stated goal was noble enough: to transition adult smokers away from their deadly burn sticks in favor of a high-tech, and presumably safer, alternative.

Were Bowen and Monsees well-intentioned visionaries who lost control of the beast they created? Or were they greedy entrepreneurs who gladly sacrificed the health of young people for their own considerable enrichment?

A bit of both, appears to be the answer.

While e-cigarettes come in many forms, they typically include a tiny battery and a cartridge of liquid nicotine. When the user inhales, the battery heats the nicotine, which turns into an inhalable aerosol.