Juul Labs is the nice scientific-sounding name of the company that makes the popular—especially with school kids—nicotine drug delivery device with the catchy name of Juul.

Now hold on a minute, Dr Symonds! Nicotine a poison? It’s no more harmful than coffee! Anyway, it’s such fun to suck nicotine-laden vapour into your lungs hundreds of times a day, every day, for years on end or even the rest of your life.

Dear reader, allow me to come clean. It’s not just I who says Juul is poison—it’s Juul Labs themselves!

The above illustration is of a Juul starter pack for the Canadian market. Whereas other jurisdictions are merely content to say on the packet

the Canadians, being a down-to-earth people, call a spade a spade.

But is it right that anyone should be selling poison – not to use, say, as a weedkiller – but to inhale into your lungs?

It doesn’t seem right to me. So I thought I’d get in touch with Juul Labs and ask them about it. Simple, surely. Go to their website and find their email address. No good. They don’t give out an email address. But there’s a question-and-answer page which helpfully provides a button labelled ‘Help me with my issue’.

Actually, it’s not my issue, but their issue that needs to be fixed.

Nothing daunted, I accepted the invitation to ‘Write out your issue and how you’d want it fixed’.  This was: ‘Will you please tell me why you are selling poison for people to inhale into their lungs?’ Waste of time, of course. The response was, ‘You did not yet indicate what Juul should do to make this right’ and ‘We are waiting for you to fix the problem and share the solution with the rest of us customers.’ This was followed by several emails wanting to know, ‘Did your Juul issue ever get resolved?’ The sender was called ‘GetHuman’, which is obviously a very unhuman robot.

Then I put the same question in a postal letter to Juul Labs CEO, Mr Kevin R Burns. His reply? Silence.

Is it right that Mr Burns should be peddling an addictive poison to the public?

There’s something just a little bit disingenuous about how they justify this. (The following quotes are from the Juul website.)

We recognize that smoking alternatives continue to be the subject of conversation.

Note it’s a conversation, not a controversy. Unfortunately, my attempts to engage in a conversation with them didn’t get anywhere.

Then we find a statement of their noble goal:

Improving the lives of the world’s one billion adult smokers by eliminating cigarettes.

Eliminating cigarettes sounds all very well, but since the Juul Labs doesn’t make cigarettes how do they intend to do it?

Like this, apparently:

JUUL is a switching product. JUUL products are not intended to be used as cessation products.

So they want to entice the world’s one billion smokers to use another poisonous product containing the addictive chemical, nicotine, instead of smoking cigarettes.

Whether anyone’s life will be improved by switching from smoking to Juuling remains to be seen.

If you want to stop smoking you don’t need a switching product – you just need to stop! This is easy enough if you go about it in the right way, as I explain with the Symonds Method.

Text © Gabriel Symonds

10 June 2019