The Vapes of Wrath

born to Chinese immigrants was truly American.

“"If the sons and daughters of Chinese are not citizens, then what of the English,”

the Irish, the Germans, the French?" The dramatic history of birthright citizenship on our series America in pursuit from through line, listen on the NPR app or wherever you get podcasts. Where does this whole story begin? So our story begins in November of 2019 at the White House where President Donald Trump

has become concerned about youth vaping. This is journalist Leon Naifok. For the past year or so, he's been looking into the rise of E-Sigarettes over the last couple of decades. And that story centers on one device in particular.

“The jewel is a sleek little USB type device that became essentially the first mainstream”

vaping. But at the time of this White House meeting back in 2019, the jewel was seen by a lot of people as this massive threat to public health. The numbers around teen use of jewel in particular are skyrocketing. Everyone thought the war on youth smoking was over. Those numbers have been going down and down and down. But here comes this new technology, this new device, the jewel that kids seem to love.

And so Trump decides to invite a whole bunch of stakeholders, people from parent groups, people from

industry to have a basically a apprentice style gathering to hash it out.

Okay, so this is like the reality TV approach to public health policy. Yeah, so I mean, you get the impression that Trump thought that by just simply getting everyone in a room and having them argue about it, he would see the path forward, he would see the obvious solution that all these other people have not been able to find. Well, this is a very big subject and it's a very complex subject. Probably a little bit less complex than some people think, but I'm here to listen and I have

that very divergent views. Who would like to start? As different people around the table respond to President Trump, the fault lines in this debate start to become clear. Broadly speaking, there are two factions. One side says that vaping is a skirt on society that's getting an entire new generation of kids addicted to nicotine. And we need to do whatever we can to

get these things out of stores and out of kids' hands. And I've never seen any of that be done

by this serious, this racket and this intent among our youth. And then on the other side, you a faction that says, okay, yes, youth vaping is a problem, but we also got to think about all these millions of smokers who are going to die if they don't quit. And vaping has been shown to be a really effective way to quit smoking. So for these folks, which includes a lot of public health experts, vaping is an imperfect solution to a really, really deadly problem. But pretty quickly,

the meeting goes from the usual introductions and pleasantries to a series of disagreements over some of the most basic facts of the situation, like how many teens are actually taking up vaping. A change of accusations that both sides are not being honest about the problem. And it gets really personal really fast. Yeah, the meeting eventually develops into an outright screaming match. It's not a very productive meeting, people are just like shouting over each other and you can't even

really hear what everybody's saying. So Trump has to kind of just put a stop to it after about an hour. And he is clearly a little bit sobered by what he has seen and his hope of making a complex object. Less complex has not, has not worked. We want to take care of our kids, going to take care of our kids. Thank you very much. When you zoom out, this meeting at the White House feels like a kind of key to understanding the broader story of how E. cigarettes came crashing into

“our lives. I mean, I think what you would you see in that chaotic meeting is it's a microcosm”

of the debate what we've been having ever since vaping took off. And ever since this thing that was supposed to solve one public health problem has seemingly spawned a whole other one. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Alexi Horowitz-Gazi and I'm Leon Nefak. I am the co-host along with journalist Arielle Pardes, of a new podcast called Backfires, the Vaving Wars. Today on the show, the parable of the jewel. How a new technology ignited a public health

Okay, so the jewel was not the first attempt to create an electronic cigarette.

“Companies had been experimenting with the idea for decades by the time jewel hit the market.”

But the rise of jewel helps explain how this technology went from a niche product to a mainstream industry worth tens of billions of dollars. And like a lot of tech companies, jewel got it start in Silicon Valley. Yeah, so the story of jewel begins on the campus of Stanford University, where two design students, James Monsies and Adam Bowen, both smokers, decide to make their thesis project a prototype of an esigrette, a device that will satisfy their cravings

as smokers and satisfy the social components of smoking without killing them. We just kind of looked at each other and thought, you know, this would be really interesting space

to look at. So our goal was to basically create a whole new experience for people that

pertains to the positive aspects of smoking like the ritual and everything, but makes it as healthy and socially acceptable as possible. How explicit was the kind of public health part of the mission

“in their pitch? I think it was genuinely core to what they wanted to do. I mean, I'm not saying that”

they were altruists who merely wanted to save lives. They also wanted to make money doing it. But I think they saw huge opportunity when they looked at the massive population of smokers who actively wanted to quit and who weren't able to quit using the smoking cessation tools that were out there. That was very much part of the pitch to investors. From the beginning, Moncie's talked about that population as both a group of people that he wanted to help, but also a group of people

that, you know, jewel could make a lot of money on. So that is the origin story of jewel. But one of the key factors in how the company was able to become a cultural phenomenon has to do with how esigarettes were regulated when James Moncie's an atom bow and were building their company. The regulatory system that jewel walked into was very murky. There wasn't really anyone they had to answer to. See, back in the 1990s, attorneys general from states across the country

had sued big tobacco companies. And the settlements they won against big tobacco, along with later legislation meant those companies were limited in how they could advertise or what kinds of flavored products they could sell. But those rules did not explicitly apply to esigarette companies. So the FDA had tried to regulate esigarettes before jewel cable long. There was like an earlier company called Endjoy. I'm still around. Endjoy wanted to

advertise and the FDA tried to block them by characterizing the endjoy as a drug delivery device.

Endjoy sued the FDA and basically took the position that they were no more a drug delivery device

than regular cigarettes. And given that the FDA at the time couldn't regulate cigarettes either, they had no standing to tell Endjoy what to do. Congress did pass a law in 2009 giving the FDA authority to regulate tobacco products like cigarettes. But it still took several years before they were able to bring esigarettes into that category, which meant that when jewel first hit the market in 2015, the company was operating in a kind of legal gray area. So the lack of regulations

around esigarettes meant the jewel was free to do a number of things that you would be really shocked by if it was a tobacco company. From the very beginning, jewel knew that flavored vape

“liquid was going to be key to making people want their products. So they had flavors like mango”

and cool cucumber. Again, not something that tobacco companies could offer. And secondly, this is really important. They were able to advertise. And as anyone who remembers the fight over the moral roman or joe camel would remember tobacco companies had their hands really tied when it came to presenting their product in a positive light and making people want to smoke marboros by showing them a cool cowboy. Jewel wasn't bound by that. And what exactly did jewel do with this

freedom they had to advertise? They try to make jewel look cool. They try to make their product look really attractive through marketing. They launch a campaign. They call vaporized. They put a big billboard in Times Square. They put a print ad in vice. And you know, they threw parties in cities where they thought they could reach cool young people who would then tell their friends about this cool new device. One of those cool young people was a woman in New York City named Tabby Wakefield

or Tabby Wakes. This is like the start of viral marketing. Like I didn't know what I was doing, but this is what I was doing I guess. Tabby Wake was someone who threw parties around the city, you know, she was just out of high school. And someone, you know, who knew someone who knew

she got paid 200 bucks to, you know, basically avail her social network of this party. And once

“she got to the jewel party, she, you know, was given samples of their products. They had a little”

bowl filled with pots. So you could take a handful of crumberlay and just dip. Mint was good and Tabaka was good and fruit punch was trash. And what she told us was that she brought her vape's back to college and her friends brought their vape's back to college and we had a bunch of jewels. So it's like your friend comes in your dorm and is like, pass me that like thing you're smoking. You're like, here you can have one. And I think as we say in the show, this was like viral

marketing as God intended it. Like they told their friends and their friends told their friends. And suddenly this weird little USB stick was an object to be coveted. Something to ask for it a party. Now, there was push back against the vaporized campaign. It reminded people of Joe Camel and it slicked Tabaka advertising in the past. So jewel changed the direction of their advertising. And growth was slow at first. But a year or so after they launched, jewel sales start to take off.

The new craze in East cigarettes, it's called jewel. And it is fine off the shelves. One store owner we spoke to says sometimes he sells out in one day. And it's not enough.

So between 2016 and 2017, you see their sales increased by sevenfold from two million units

“sold in 2016 to 16 million in 2017. And you know, I just remember that suddenly they were everywhere.”

I mean, walking on the street, you saw people jueling, you know, celebrities were starting to be caught with jules, you know, the word jewel becomes a verb. That's how you know your winning is when people say jueling instead of whatever else, vaping. And it's around this time that a lot of people start to notice that while jules target audience, maybe adult smokers looking to quit, the company's rising popularity is also being driven by teenagers. I mean, I remember walking

down the street on my way to work and seeing high school kids, standing around vaping. And those same kids would keep vaping when they got to school. You know, they were vaping in the bathroom. They were vaping in class. But you could also go on YouTube and you could see kids talking about how they get away with jueling at school. I'm going to go over a couple different ways

“to hit your jule while you're in school and not get caught. Giving people advice on how to”

pack your jule into your socks or how to, how to exhale the vapor into your sweater so that there's no one can see it or smell it. And that brought a whole new kind of attention on jule. In just a couple of years on the market, jule had gone from total obscurity to being a fixture of teen life, flooding into home rooms and study halls across the country, which brings us to the next part of the story, the backlash. This is when parents and anti-to-backo activists

started calling for government action. And the thing that really pushed government regulators to act was a survey. So the real thunder clap was the CDC's annual youth tobacco survey, which they've been administering for years. And so the early results from the survey hit the desk of a man named Mitch Seller, who had been put in charge of the FDA's efforts to regulate cigarettes. The **** hit the fan in 2018. When we saw the explosion in the rise of kids use of e-cigarettes

from 2017 to 2018, it turned out to be a 76% increase in kids use of e-cigarettes in one year. So I looked at these numbers in shock. So Seller just rang the alarm. He brought the results of the youth tobacco survey straight to the FDA commissioner at the time. Scott Gottlieb and Gottlieb had the same reaction and he goes out in public and he calls this an epidemic. The FDA will not tolerate a whole generation of young people becoming addicted to nicotine has a trade-off

for enabling adults to have unfettered access to these same products. And from the beginning, the theory of the case was that the reason kids are flocking to these products and to jewel specifically was flavors. Kids love flavors. Kids love candy. They are curious about a mango-flavored USB stick. And so the number one priority became getting rid of flavored e-cigarettes. And faced with the threat of a crackdown from the FDA, jewel decides to voluntarily

withdraw most of its flavors from retail stores. They announced they're going to take those mango and fruit and cucumber jewel pods and only sell them online where they can use an age verification tool. It seems like they're on board and by all appearances like they are cooperating with the FDA. And then the FDA finds out about something along with rest of the world that

really shocks them. Altria is taking an almost $13 billion step towards making sure its business model

formally known as Philip Morris, and the company that makes marbros. Altria says that its investment

“will boost Jewel's value to $38 billion making it more valuable than Ford, Delta Airlines,”

or Target. Well, a big nicotine entering, jewel. That's a scary thing for parents that I know no idea how to contain this issue. All of a sudden, you're looking at a very different situation where a company whose existence was premised on destroying a company like Philip Morris and putting them out of business was now taking their money and essentially getting into bed with them. And this decision only seems to raise more outrage and more concern among regulators.

And so even with this huge new infusion of money, the company becomes more embattled than ever.

Yeah, this was definitely Jewel's worst year. I mean, first James Moncie is the co-founders

dragged in front of Congress and faces extremely hostile questions from politicians who see him as a drug pusher. You sir, you don't ask for permission. You asked for forgiveness.

“You're nothing but a marketer of a poison in your target has been young people.”

And then almost at the same time as this hearing takes place, people start dying of something that people think is connected to vaping. That's kind of all we knew for a while. We have been reporting heavily recently on vaping and the growing health concerns. Last week, we learned there are now five deaths being reported on it or blamed on it. Indiana, Minnesota and California, each reported a vaping related death on Friday.

Eventually, it was determined that the majority of these cases were linked to a kind of oil used in THC vapes, not mass market nicotine vapes like Jewel. But at the time, no one knew what was causing this mysterious vaping illness and it got a ton of media coverage, which eventually reached President Trump. And so Trump is starting to hear about vaping from various people, including Melania, who is worried about their son bear and at school,

and Trump decides that he needs to do something about it. We have a problem in our country. It's a new problem. It's called vaping, especially vaping as it pertains to innocent children. And they're coming home and they're saying, "Mom, I want a vaping." So Trump calls in Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. He calls in the acting commissioner of the FDA. They have press conference, make it clear that they are going after flavors,

that flavors are the main way they see dealing with the teen problem. So with the President's support, the Food and Drug Administration intends to finalize a guidance document that would commence enforcement to require that all flavors, other than tobacco flavor, would be removed from the market. Okay, so they announced what sounds like kind of a definitive plan here, just get rid of these flavors.

“But it turns out to be a bit more complicated, right? Like what happens to that idea?”

Well, what happens to that idea is that it turns out not everyone likes it. It turns out that there is, in fact, a constituency of people out there who are adults who vote and who like their flavored vapes. There are people who have quit smoking using flavored vapes. There are people for whom it just become part of their lifestyle. And Trump is sort of taking a back when he starts getting concerted pushback from this voting block, who actually might be important to Trump's reelection. They live in

swing states like Michigan. There's a survey that Trump becomes aware of, his advisor showed to him,

that says that 83% of people who vape would become single issue voters, basically, if

their ability to vape was threatened by whatever the FDA had in store. And what seemed like a really easy win, you know, who doesn't want to prevent kids from becoming addicted to the nicotine, certainly starts to look like kind of a headache because it turns out there's another side of the story. And this kind of brings us back to that White House meeting that we talked about at the beginning of the show, right? Yes, so part of his sort of attempt to think through this issue,

that's when Trump invites everybody, he can think of who cares about vaping to come to the White House and argue about it. After this meeting, it takes the Trump administration a little over a month before they announced where they've actually landed on this question. And in the end, the FDA's new policy does put a ban on vape flavors, just in a very particular way. The flavor ban, you know, spiritually sounds exactly what they've been talking about, but

in the way that the policies actually written, they leave open huge loophole by limiting their policy to what they describe as cartridge-based devices. So in other words, a device like jewel where

whatever, you can't do that anymore. Can't have flavored pods, can't have flavored cartridges.

It really just is aimed at jewel. The Trump administration decided to kind of split the difference between the main factions in this debate. They were essentially trying to stop the most popular device from selling the flavors that teens craved. Yet, they were still allowing some flavors to appease the adult vapors who'd organized against an outright flavor ban. But this solution struck some public health officials as a recipe for more problems, including Mitch Zeller,

who was in charge of regulating tobacco products at the FDA. The White House made this decision. I received a phone call from a political person at FDA telling me what the policy was going to be

“as decided by the White House. And I said, well, if that's what you're telling me to do,”

we will write that guidance. But I just got to tell you from a public health perspective, this is not sound or wise policy. And I said, if this administration is really concerned about flavored cigarettes, it can't draw the line just to cartridge and pod-based products, because it'll be whack-a-mo. And you know what happened after that. Coming up after the break, the vaping market explodes, and the malls run a month.

Hey, Daryan Woods here. The Empire State Building was built in the 1930s, but it still holds lessons for projects today. Everything was standardized. Everything was modularized. In fact, the architects and the engineers said, we're not really building, you know, 100 floor skyscrapers here. We're just building the same floor a hundred times.

“And our latest bonus episode, it's my extended conversation with Ben Fubayer. He's studied”

thousands of big projects and has come up with some principles that can guide ventures, big and small to success. That's for planet money plus listeners. If that's you, thanks, if it's not, it could be. You could get sponsor free listening and support the work of planet money. Just go to plus.npi.org. In January of 2020, the FDA announced a ban on flavored vaping

cartridges, basically targeting jewel in hopes of solving the problem of youth vaping.

Instead, the problem kind of exploded in a whole new direction. Flavored jewel pods were no longer allowed on store shelves, but almost immediately scores of new competitors rushed in, offering brightly colored disposable vapes. And these disposable have been an enormous hit. A lot of these disposable are way way stronger in terms of how much nicotine you inhale when

“you hit one. And more to the point, the hair so much more aggressive than jewel ever was”

in terms of offering a dizzying array of of kid-friendly flavors. I mean, I tried a lot of these vapes over the course of our reporting for this series. I'm going off top of my head here, but you know, there was a blue raspberry. There was a match of flavored one. There was a watermelon ice. There was something called beach day, which is rather abstract for a flavor, but I gather it, you know, evokes the spirit of hanging out by the ocean. You know, they took

the appeal of jewel. Specifically, the aspect of jewels appeal that really spoke to young people and just turned it up to 11. Now, most of these disposable vapes are actually illegal. Vape companies are supposed to apply for approval from the FDA or get a waiver in order to sell their products legally. But at this point, there are just so many new makes and models that the FDA has found itself playing this kind of nightmarish game of lacimal. They hear about the latest

vape, the kids are into. They do everything to take it off the market. Only for something else to take its place. So in many cases, these disposable brands are coming from overseas. The FDA can't even really figure out who runs them in some cases. They try to send them warning letters

when they can find their addresses that say, basically, like, you can't be selling this stuff.

And they try to add certain brands of vape to like lists of products that are banned from import, you know, the customs people at the border can seize. And that does stop a couple of brands in their tracks. But overall, what the FDA finds is that these companies are extremely nimble and pretty brazen. Sometimes they just rebrand, you know, L. Far, when they got put on the import ban list, the company just put out a new line of vape called EB create. And everyone understood

that these new vape were the same as the old ones, you know, made by the same company, maybe some different flavors. But, you know, the FDA couldn't really do anything about it because the industry was just moving so much faster than they could. And this explosion in unregulated e-sigarettes has only added to the health concerns around vape because we just don't know the

what the long-term health effects of vape even are. Okay, so Leon, after reporting on the rise of

the vape industry for more than a year now, what is your big takeaway here? Like, what do you think

“is the moral of the dual story? I think maybe the moral of the story of dual is what we're in an”

age where things can become widely adopted so much faster than it was possible in the past.

And that in itself is like a new challenge for regulators who always had to be reactive in one

way or another, but now are finding that so many new technologies get introduced and widely adopted in a way that makes them really hard to put back in the bottle. In a way, you can think of the story

“of dual as the story of a lot of regulation. When a new technology springs up, regulators have to make”

this choice on how restrictive or lenient to be. To restrictive and they risk depriving consumers of potentially lifesaving products, to lenient and they run the risk of unimagined consequences. And given how long it takes to pass new legislation and figure out enforcement, it can be nearly impossible for regulators to prevent this chaos before it's unleashed.

“Today's episode is just one small slice of the story that Leon and co-host Ariel Pardas”

tell in their new podcast series, backfired the vaping of the first. They've got insider accounts

of the design and marketing of the jewel. They go along for a real-time police bust of illegal age sellers and they have a sit-down interview with one of the people who created jewel. I'm James Montes and the co-founder of jewel. Can I ask you why you decided that you were ready to talk about it? You certainly can, ask that. You can find the whole series on audible. We'll also put a link to the series in our episode description. And we should say Amazon, which owns audible supports

and pays to distribute some NPR content. Today's episode was produced by Emma Peasley, an edited by Jess Zhang, with help from Annie Brown. It was fact checked by Sophia Schoocana, an engineered by Sina Lofredo. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. Special thanks to Kim Gittleson, Sam Lee, and Andrew Parsons. I'm Leon Mayfock. And I'm Alexi Horowitz-Gazzi. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.

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