The city of Louisville, Ky. has filed a lawsuit against Juul Labs, alleging that the vaping giant purposely marketed its products to youth, despite vaping health hazards and addictiveness of e-cigarettes.

The lawsuit cites several significant health risks of nicotine, including cardiovascular, respiratory, and gastrointestinal problems, as well as the addictiveness of e-cigarettes. Despite the marketing of products like e-cigarettes and other “modified risk” nicotine products as a safer alternative to traditional smoking, the lawsuit notes that “it is no known that these products are not less harmful.”

The lawsuit alleges that Juul purposely marketed its hazardous e-cigarette products to young people, developing “a product and marketing strategy that sought to portray its e-cigarette products as trend-setting, stylish and used by the type of people teenagers look up to, and one that was a healthy alternative to traditional tobacco use.”

One of the ways Juul did this, the lawsuit claims, was the use of social media “influencers” to help portray the product as in vogue with the youth of today. The company also paid third parties to refer customers to Juul’s website—but these Juul affiliates were not allowed to disclose that they were, in fact, affiliated with the e-cigarette company.

Juul didn’t just target young people, the lawsuit argues, but middle and high school students specifically. (The lawsuit refers to this targeting of children as creating “new customers for life.”)

Juul allegedly did this by holding “educational” programs at schools, to “raise awareness” of their nicotine products, going so far as to sponsor a children’s summer camp. Their sponsorship, the lawsuit alleges, led them to receive data on the kids at camp, who ranged from grade 3 to grade 12. While the lawsuit makes no claims as to what Juul did with the data, it notes that “the possibilities are frightening.”

On top of the aesthetically pleasing, youth-focused design of the product and the marketing strategies gearing the product at young people, the company has also “misrepresented material facts regarding Juul’s products and their effects on users,” the lawsuit claims.

“Juul successfully created a misleading impression that Juul products were intended for youth and healthy,” the lawsuit claims. “Juul has succeeded in addicting a generation of youth to nicotine.”

The city of Louisville filed its lawsuit on Jan. 15, 2020, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The Kentucky Department for Public Health released a statement in Oct. 2019 urging its residents to stop using e-cigarettes and other vaping products due to the addictiveness of e-cigarettes and related health hazards.

Louisville is not the first organization to file litigation against Juul. According to NPR, earlier this year, San Diego’s public schools filed a lawsuit against Juul, also alleging that the company deliberately marketed its vaping products to young people, despite their hazards and despite the progress made for years in anti-smoking campaigns.

The Juul Vaping Addiction Lawsuit is Case No. 3:20-cv-00317, in the U.S. District Court for the San Francisco Division of the Northern District of California.

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