https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Open-Forum-Juul-s-claims-of-effectiveness-in-13701384.php

Comment; Am very suspect of Juul’s claims and they’ve been called out on copyright violation/plagarism. With that said, vaping IS an effective part of a total program geared toward nicotine weaning to cessation.

By Bonnie Halpern-Felsher and Karma McKelvey March 19, 2019 Updated: March 19, 2019 6:19 p.m.Comments3

1of3Juul and Big Tobacco have lobbied for months to protect themselves from aspects of the FDA’s crackdown.Photo: Scott Mcintyre / New York Times
2of3Scott Gottlieb, President Trump’s pick for commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration is known for his aggressive efforts to regulate the tobacco and e-cigarette industries, resigned March 5, 2019.Photo: Eric Thayer / New York Times 2017
3of3A woman exits Juul Labs headquarters and begins to smoke a vape pen on Thursday, December 20, 2018, in San Francisco.Photo: Amy Osborne / Special to The Chronicle 2018

Would you ask a tobacco company to do the research and development to help people quit smoking?

It’s a no-brainer that people who profit from people’s addiction to nicotine are the wrong choice to carry out such work, but that’s precisely what San Francisco-based Juul Labs is purporting to do. It has launched an ambitious research and education program with the stated aim of helping people quit smoking. Outgoing U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb is so skeptical of Juul’s smoking prevention and cessation claims that Tuesday he raised the possibility of pulling pod-based products like Juuls off the market if youth vaping use continues to rise.

According to a recent CNBC report, Juul Labs is working with employers and insurers to “help their employees stop smoking conventional cigarettes” by using Juuls. The company plans to survey possible candidate organizations for this new smoking cessation program and will provide discounted products and support in forms such as educational articles and instructional videos, CNBC says.

Allowing this new program is tantamount to regulators, researchers and the general public agreeing, sans any independent scientific evidence, that Juul is a cessation device. To make therapeutic or cessation-related claims, Juul Labs is required to apply for and receive authorization from the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. Juul Labs does not have such authorization, nor does it have a pending application.

Related Stories

This is not the first time Juul has circumvented or ignored the rules.

Juul has a history of creating education curricula that are suspect. In 2017-2018, it created and disseminated its youth vaping-prevention curriculum, vowing to prevent youth use of Juuls. As we wrote in the Journal of Adolescent Health, the company failed to provide content or strategies germane to successful tobacco prevention programs. Nowhere did it discuss the role of flavors, how tobacco companies use marketing to attract new users, the high level of nicotine in a JuulPod, or the health effects of e-cigarettes. In fact, the company barely mention the word “Juul” in its curriculum.

Perhaps even more disturbing to us personally, Juul described its curriculum as being “drawn largely from the work of Stanford Medicine,” with a link to the Tobacco Prevention Toolkit that we developed. One of the PowerPoint slide decks in Juul’s curriculum was identical to materials found in the toolkit, and other components of the Juul curriculum were taken from or mirror the toolkit and other previously published education materials.

Juul used our material without permission, violating the copyright. But the infringement on Stanford’s intellectual property isn’t the issue: Juul’s unwillingness to spend the time and effort consulting us and learning about our program casts doubts on its commitment to develop an effective curriculum. It chose to “look good” rather than “do good.”

Juul’s youth curriculum, as well as its more recent efforts, are as much about growing its own business as curtailing tobacco use. In the self-evaluation section of its youth curriculum, young vapers were asked to indicate, “What’s appealing about using e-cigarettes or Juuls? Why do students use them?” Such questions are reminiscent of strategies once employed by Big Tobacco to garner data on smoking from a segment of the population off-limits to their marketing: youth. Fast-forward to Juul’s new “anti-smoking” plan whereby surveys will also be conducted. Is this simply another avenue to discover how to make e-cigarettes more appealing?

If Juul really wanted to be in the cessation business, then it would — like any good cessation program — have options to facilitate nicotine step-down, by offering pods with less nicotine to allow users to wean themselves off and eventually quit. Juul offers no such products.

Juul’s claim that its devices are a cessation tool is certainly unlawful and it’s also another warning flag that this is a company that should not be trusted to safeguard public health. This is the company that publicly disavowed tobacco-industry affiliation, then, with great fanfare, sold 35 percent of its business to Altria, makers of Marlboro tobacco.

Juul proclaims that its product is not for youth, yet it continues to entice youth, who constitute a large segment of its customer base, with hip, slick and cool yummy-flavored products. Its prevention curriculum is prevention in name more than substance. Its latest initiative seeks to take the good intentions of institutions trying to help people lead healthier lives and using those intentions to addict them to a death-delivery system.

Juul Lab’s track record equates it with Big Tobacco, and once again supports the notion that no tobacco company should ever do its own research or prevention. The FDA, other regulators and the public should take note, be aware and stop these actions.

Bonnie Halpern-Felsher is a professor of pediatrics at Stanford University and the founder and executive director of the Tobacco Prevention Toolkit. Karma McKelvey is a postdoctoral fellow in Halpern-Felsher’s lab.

Dr. Raymond Oenbrink