We killed the cigarette. What we got in return is mango-flavored nicotine in 'party mod... - 0 views
-
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 percent from a year ago, according to Nielsen data.
- ...7 more annotations...
-
Even the surgeon general’s landmark warning in the late 1960s that linked smoking to cancer couldn’t get Americans to quit. Instead, they gave it up at a glacial pace — by 2016 just 15.5 percent of adults smoked, according to the most recent CDC data, and it was largely thanks to a culture shift that cast the small circles of smokers who’d gather to puff outside of office buildings and bars as deeply uncool. They were addicts.
-
And Juul kept the nicotine and chucked out all the rest — the thin casing of paper that always seemed to fall apart in the bottom of our purses, the flakes of tobacco, the tar, the carbon dioxide, the smell, the very form of the cigarette.
-
“All of our smoking actual tobacco has gone way, way down,” noted Brian Maslowski, an instructor of alcohol, drug and tobacco seminars for Fairfax County Public Schools. The kids he encounters Juuling, he says, are “very much aware of the risks and consequences of smoking.
-
To Allan M. Brandt, a historian and author of "The Cigarette Century," Juul is anything but new and different. "It represents the cultural norms and notions of the cigarette, which was very much youth-oriented," he said. "It was kind of forbidden; it was extremely cool."
-
Could it be that with Juul, it’s just a different generation simply doing what young people have always done — testing boundaries, sneaking independence? Teen pregnancy is down, and marijuana is practically normalized. Perhaps Juul is just the new boogeyman to replace all the old ones.
-
“It spread like wildfire, for two reasons,” he said. “The first reason is the flashy flavors like creme brulee. The flavors are responsible for bringing the kids in, the nicotine keeps them.”
-
“I think the history of this tells me, don’t trust these industries,” said Brandt, the smoking historian. “Juul can say, ‘We’re not interested in kids; we’re going to fight the use of this in kids.’ But with flavors like mango, and cool cucumber. . . .” Cigarette makers have always said they didn’t want kids to smoke, he continued. But bad news about children lighting up on the schoolyard, he said, “was always great news for the tobacco companies.