Moving to Ban Juul, the FDA Delivers a Blow to Big Nicotine
Marlboro maker Altria, which has a stake in the e-cigarette maker, takes a hit, too.
Device kits made by Juul Labs for sale at a store in San Francisco in 2019.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
The US Food and Drug Administration’s announcement on Thursday that it’s ordering the removal of Juul, the popular electronic cigarette, from store shelves is a stinging rebuke to the Silicon Valley startup, which vowed to transform smoking but instead helped spark a new generation of teenage nicotine addicts.
When the e-cigarettes made by the company that would become Juul Labs Inc. hit the market in the summer of 2015, with flashy billboards in New York’s Times Square and youthful Instagram models flaunting the sleek nicotine device, it was clear the company was in for a reckoning. A generation earlier, Big Tobacco had been denounced for hawking cigarettes to young people and for lying to the American public about the deadly and addictive nature of its product.