The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), concerned about the bad health effects of JUUL, filed a lawsuit against the company at the end of October.

LAUSD alleges JUUL encouraged young students to start vaping by selling candy-flavored and fruit-flavored nicotine-laden JUUL pods, which are cartridges filled with noxious chemicals and flavorings, too.

According to the lawsuit, e-cigarette use among middle school and high school students increased 900 percent between the years 2011 and 2015.

In LAUSD, more than 30 percent of L.A. County high schoolers said they used e-cigarettes, according to a report from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health released Aug. 19, 2019. Ten percent of those students admitted to regular use of e-cigarette products, up from 6.4 percent the year prior.

In its lawsuit, LAUSD alleges a major cause of the vaping epidemic is JUUL Labs, Inc., the maker of the JUUL e-cigarette that controls more than 70 percent of the market. JUUL has become such a dominant force in the e-cig industry that many consumers refer to the act of vaping as “JUUL-ing.”

Even though JUUL has denied marketing its vaping products to youth, the FDA, the FTC, many state attorneys general and Congress have all started investigations into JUUL’s marketing practices over the past several years.

JUUL has said its e-cigarettes are designed as a smoking cessation product aimed at adults and that e-cigs are healthier than regular cigarettes. In September 2019, the FDA sent JUUL a warning that it had violated federal law by making unauthorized claims that Juul vaping products are safer than cigarettes.

While e-cigs do not contain tobacco, they do contain nicotine. In fact, certain varieties of JUUL pods have as much nicotine as an entire carton of cigarettes.

Nicotine can cause a lot of harm to the human body, including an increased risk of peptic ulcers, blood clots, hardening of the arteries, irregular heart rhythms and lung spasms. According to CNET, nicotine also can adversely affect the brain’s development in children and young adults who are under 25 years old.

Bad Health Effects of Juul and Flavorings

According to the University of California-Riverside, there are 99 different chemical flavorings among the 20 most popular vaping cartridges. One flavor alone was made of anywhere from 22 to 47 different chemicals. Ethyl maltol, a known toxin, was found to be an ingredient in more than half of all vaping formulas tested.

The bad health effects of JUUL don’t necessarily take years to develop like cigarette smoking does. As of Oct. 29, 2019, at least 1,888 cases of a mysterious lung illness related to vaping have been confirmed, according to the CDC. Thirty-seven people have died from the vaping linked illness since the beginning of summer. Nearly 80 percent of the patients have been under 35 years old, and 40 percent of them have been between 18 and 24 years old.

The Bad Health Effects of Juul Lawsuit is Los Angeles Unified School District v. Juul Labs Inc. et al., Case No. 1932301, in the Superior Court of the State of California, County of San Bernardino.

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This article is not legal advice. It is presented
for informational purposes only.