Nicotine is a healthier habit than tobacco

By John Gapper

Inventing a product that is wildly popular is not usually a setback for a technology company. But that is the difficulty facing Juul Labs, the San Francisco start-up behind the best-selling US ecigarette.
Juul is the Nespresso of vaping — a sleek device that works with a collection of flavoured pods, including mango and cucumber, to deliver an intense hit of nicotine in a cloud of vapour. It mimics so well the pleasure of smoking that “Juuling” has become a craze among teenagers and taken 72 per cent of the US ecigarette market. The company, which was founded three years ago, is now valued at $16bn.
Juul Labs is in trouble with the US Food and Drug Administration, which does not want to get fooled by the industry again. Tobacco companies hid the harmful effects of smoking for decades and the FDA is under intense pressure not to let ecigarette use turn into a similar scandal. It has threatened to curb adults’ freedom to vape if companies such as Juul cannot keep ecigarettes away from under-18s.
The FDA should chill out and take a lesson from the more relaxed attitudes to vaping in countries such as Germany and the UK. Tobacco causes cancer, lung problems and heart disease, killing 480,000 Americans a year, and nicotine is the addictive alkaloid in tobacco. But these two facts do not prove that nicotine is a dangerous drug that needs to be treated as an equal menace.

Worse than a category error, this would be stupid. Getting a nicotine habit is a waste of money, and puffing from what looks like a USB drive may lead others to question your sanity. But it is nothing like as dangerous as smoking — the best estimates are that ecigarettes convey about 0.5 per cent of the cancer risk and 5 per cent of the overall health risk of cigarettes.
Health campaigners ought to welcome vaping, rather than confusing smokers with grim warnings that make it sound as if ecigarettes are not much better than the real thing. The reason why shares of tobacco companies such as Philip Morris International, the world’s largest, have fallen sharply is that smokers in developed economies are increasingly giving up, partly thanks to the arrival of satisfying substitutes.
Teenagers really should not vape, since there is some medical evidence that nicotine affects their brain development (although the same can be said of caffeine, and Nespresso pods do not carry health warnings). But the risk is not so high that it justifies encouraging adults to keep smoking in order to cut off the supply of Juuls and other vaping devices to school students.
Although Juul Labs has become public enemy number one in the US vaping crackdown, I admire how it has shaken up the industry. “We are not concerned about Juul,” André Calantzopoulos, chief executive of Philip Morris, declared at its annual investor day. He sounded concerned, though.
Like other tech disrupters, Juul Labs had the advantage of starting from scratch and not being bound by tradition. Tobacco companies offer ecigarettes but they often resemble fountain pens with glowing ends; Juul Labs rejected the idea of imitating a cigarette and produced a sleeker object.
Tobacco companies are also investing in devices that heat tobacco leaves to produce nicotine rather than burning them, which is as close as you can get to smoking without lighting up. Philip Morris’s IQOS heated tobacco brand has done well in Japan, taking 16 per cent of the market, but it feels more like imitation than innovation.

It has been harder to gain regulators’ approval for the devices than for ecigarettes that do not contain tobacco. Philip Morris is trying to get the FDA to approve IQOS for sale in the US and is suing the South Korean government over a regulatory finding that it produces harmful substances.
The company is probably right that heated devices are preferable to traditional cigarettes — it says its own tests show that IQOS is far less toxic, although independent research is needed. But a break with the tobacco-infused past, as represented by Juul and other ecigarettes, is simpler and clearer.