Popular e-cigarette maker Juul is in the hot seat after Minnesota became the first state to take the company to trial.
Minnesota is seeking more than $100 million in damages, accusing Washington, D.C.-based Juul of unlawfully targeting young people. Chantee Lans reports.Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison personally opened his state's case against Juul Labs on Tuesday, accusing the e-cigarette maker of using "slick products, clever ads and attractive flavors" to hook children on nicotine as the first of thousands of cases against the company reached trial.
Juul has faced thousands of lawsuits nationwide but most have settled, including 39 with other states and U.S. territories. Not Minnesota, which won a landmark $7.1 billion settlement with the tobacco industry in 1998. Minnesota added tobacco industry giant Altria, which formerly owned a minority stake in Juul, as a co-defendant in 2020.
William Geraghty, an attorney for Altria, denied Ellison's assertions that Altria invested heavily in Juul because it ultimately wanted to hook kids on its cigarettes, which include Marlboro. He said Altria bought its passive stake because Juul had found the key to successfully switching adult smokers of conventional cigarettes to a less harmful product, while Altria's competing e-cigarettes had failed in the marketplace.
In his opening statement, Ellison argued that Juul and Altria broke the law by using deceptive actions to sell tobacco products to minors. Juul purposely made its products small and sleek to make detection by adults difficult, formulated them to deliver high doses of nicotine to addict children, added flavors that would appeal to young people and used a marketing campaign they knew would appeal to teens, Ellison said.
Bernick said Minnesota had experienced an "exponential increase' in youth vaping even before Juul arrived on the local market in late 2017. And he asserted that the company had already ended some of its most-criticized practices, suggesting that Juul itself wasn't to blame for the rise.
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