The question at hand is whether Juul intentionally marketed nicotine to people below 18.
There's pretty strong circumstantial evidence that they did. Building relationships w teenage social media influencers is part of that.
The unfortunate fact is that Juul achieved explosive popularity among high schoolers. It spearheaded a U turn in youth nicotine use rates, which had been declining for a long time and are now way up.
The investigation is here to determine to what extent this was the result of a deliberate strategy.
That they marketed the investment to a 19 year old kid says nothing about whether they marketed anything to those under 18. It isn’t a lead that they FTC could use in any kind of reasonable investigation.
High schoolers during my day smoked a lot, and did a lot of pot. They didn’t need to be marketed to, they will find the bad stuff on their own. Marketing to them directly would actually have the opposite effect (eg nothing promoted drug use more effectively than DARE). I feel like we’ve all become old fogeys that remember nothing about what it was like to be teenagers.
Actually, it's a comment on an Internet forum, which could be a faithfully retold anecdote or a pure fabrication. In fact, if the book were current, I would be more inclined to take that post as an advertisement for the novel 'Less Than Zero', which I may check out later.
You make a good point though, that we somehow expect that kids exist in a vacuum when they are actually full and active participants in society. It is ludicrous to think that Juul's advertising to make their product seem desirable to adults would not also affect young people. It's similarly unrealistic to think that kids wouldn't vape in the absence of any advertising whatsoever.
I wonder what kind of evidence might be uncovered that would prove Juul did something that is clearly illegal. Joe Camel was held to be a cartoon character and therefore an appeal directly to children. In the case of Juul hiring influencers though, perhaps they could analyze the influencers' analytics data and see if they disproportionately reach under-18s, but pure numerics might be hard to sell to a jury without a smoking gun like an email that says "sign Jim Fortnite because he's big with the 14-16 year olds this week".
There's pretty strong circumstantial evidence that they did. Building relationships w teenage social media influencers is part of that.
The unfortunate fact is that Juul achieved explosive popularity among high schoolers. It spearheaded a U turn in youth nicotine use rates, which had been declining for a long time and are now way up.
The investigation is here to determine to what extent this was the result of a deliberate strategy.