40 million dollars. It’s as much as the company Juul Labs agreed to pay in North Carolina to stop the first of several lawsuits filed against its marketing campaigns in favor of electronic cigarettes that would lead to addiction in young people and create a vast new public health problem.
The agreement allows the company to avoid going to court where children and parents would have paraded. The process, reports the New York Times, would have fallen during the summer at the same time that the Food and Drug Administration, the American body that deals with the regulation of food and pharmaceutical products, should decide whether products such as electronic cigarettes that use the vaporization and steam inhalation can stand on the market.
This agreement only eliminates however one of the lawsuits pending against the company. Another 13 states, including California, Massachusetts, New York and the District of Columbia have filed similar lawsuits. They all have the same basis: the company knew or should have known that it encouraged teenagers to use products that contain high levels of nicotine. There are about 2,000 other lawsuits filed by cities, counties, school districts and others. Many have been aggregated as has happened in the past for the lawsuits against opioid producers and sellers.
“For years,” said Josh Stein, the North Carolina Attorney General who initiated the lawsuit in 2019, “Juul has targeted young people, including teenagers, for sell addictive e-cigarettes. It was the spark that triggered an epidemic of vaporization among children, evident in all the high schools of the state ».
The company got the deal without admitting how disputed it was. It was one of his goals also in view of future causes. In the press release of the company we read that the fight against the use made by the minors and to decrease that of adults.
Electronic cigarettes and other products vaping they are born as less harmful than traditional tobacco products. However, the company is challenged that its captivating campaigns for younger people would have led to smoking even boys who would not. Furthermore, even though e-cigarettes do not contain the carcinogens that tobacco contains, scientists and public health experts still have concerns about their negative effects on the health of young people. There addiction they produce could lead to smoking real cigarettes.
The agreed sum, to be paid over six years, should be used per program detoxification from electronic cigarettes. The company will only be able to use testimonials over the age of 35 in advertising campaigns. Jull products will no longer be on free sale in the state, but from behind the counter and age-controlled. It will be the same company that will have to send young buyers every year to check that 1000 stores do not sell to minors.
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