Netflix’s Juul docuseries Big Vape is a fairer than usual look at an issue America got dead wrong
Jacob Grier
Adam Bowen and James Monsees, the founders of Juul, declined to take part in Big Vape, the new Netflix docuseries about their company based on the book of the same name by journalist Jamie Ducharme. It’s easy to understand why. They took plenty of public abuse throughout the moral panic over vaping, and, having exited the company as reported billionaires, they have little reason to volunteer for another turn in the barrel. But it’s a shame that they didn’t. Big Vape tells a story more nuanced than the cheap alarmism that characterized contemporary reporting on the company.
Over the course of four episodes, the documentary covers the “rise and fall of Juul” from its scrappy beginnings as a Silicon Valley startup determined to end smoking to its demonization for sparking a youth vaping epidemic and its partial sellout to Altria, the biggest of Big Tobacco companies.
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Interviews with longtime employees humanize the company. Two are ex-smokers who kicked the deadly habit with Juul’s own product; another is motivated by the loss of her father to lung cancer. Even many of the antagonists interviewed acknowledge the potential of e-cigarettes to avert some of the millions of deaths caused by cigarettes. The story is a tragedy, the tale of a mission-focused company that had the potential to change the world undone by the hubris of its executives.
It’s compelling viewing, for the most part. Only episode two lags. Its 44-minute runtime covers the notorious launch of Juul with a glam marketing campaign that branded it more as a youthful lifestyle accessory than as a lower-risk alternative for adult smokers. Juul made a mistake in acting like it was selling a tech product rather than an addictive and stigmatized drug. This is well-trod territory that could just as well have been a 10-minute YouTube video. Viewers may want to skip ahead to episodes three and four, which dig into the far more interesting political conflicts over young people vaping.
I was most curious to see how the documentary would handle the 2019 outbreak of lung illnesses that killed nearly 70 people. These deaths are inextricably linked to public perceptions of vaping and government crackdowns on e-cigarettes, but the actual cause was adulterants in mostly illicit cannabis products. Both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and most journalists completely botched the story, doing long-term damage to the cause of tobacco harm reduction. It’s a sad commentary on our institutions that at the peak of the outbreak, readers could get better information from the marijuana consumer magazine Leafly than from the CDC or the New York Times.
Big Vape handles this complexity mostly well. The final episode features riveting testimony from two young vapers who faced near-death illness before pivoting to the reveal that it was cannabis products, not Juul, that were ultimately implicated in the outbreak. The series’s most significant misstep on the topic comes by teasing the epidemic of lung illnesses in the opening montage of episode one, implying Juul’s guilt by association, without explaining the real story until more than halfway through episode four. Viewers who drop out in the intervening 165 minutes will be badly misinformed.
Viewers may also walk away with a misperception that the problem of youth tobacco use was practically solved until Juul came along. A high school teacher from California’s wealthy Marin County states that when he started working in tobacco use prevention in 2012, less than 1% of freshmen smoked habitually. Whatever the source of this stat, it’s hardly representative. The National Youth Tobacco Survey of that year found that 14% of high schoolers reported using cigarettes and 23% reported using some form of tobacco. By 2022, the same survey found high school cigarette use reduced to just 2%. Smoking among high schoolers has all but disappeared in the vape era, but the documentary is too focused on teenagers vaping to acknowledge this tremendous progress.
Adult smokers and vapers are also banished to the periphery of Big Vape. We get visceral testimony from hooked teenagers but much less from cigarette smokers struggling to quit or adult vapers whose means of quitting may be taken from them by overbearing government regulation. The series generally takes an admirably non-stigmatizing view of nicotine consumption, but the enormity of the 400,000 American smoking deaths every year and the massive potential for safer products to avert that loss of life never quite lands.
As the show amply demonstrates, American smokers deserved better than Juul. They also deserve better from the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration, the press, politicians, and anti-vaping activists. But it is only Juul, alone among these groups in creating a product that actually helps smokers, that comes under sustained scrutiny. The rest are let off with light, if any, criticism.
The FDA particularly warrants critical attention. Former agency leaders Scott Gottlieb and Mitch Zeller, both featured in the documentary, acknowledge that e-cigarettes are far safer than conventional cigarettes. Yet the agency has blatantly abdicated its responsibility to authorize lower-risk nicotine products, giving the green light to only 23 of the approximately 4 million applications it received, none of them in flavors that most adult vapers want. A persistent theme of Big Vape is that Juul erred by following the Silicon Valley ethos of “move fast and break things.” Fair enough, but some sense of urgency is sorely needed at the FDA, whose own ethos could be described as “move slowly and let smokers die.”
In service of telling a compelling story, the documentary risks overselling the power of both marketing and regulation. Much is made of Juul’s reckless “Vaporized” ad campaign, the original sin that has dogged the company for its entire existence. But youth vaping took on a life of its own. It’s unclear how different the long-run trajectory would have been even if Juul had acted more responsibly.
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Similarly, regulation of e-cigarettes has proven ineffectual. Removing flavored Juuls from the market didn’t end the sale of flavored vapes; it simply invited a flood of black and gray market imports that are less transparent and less susceptible to regulation than Juul ever was. Recent analysis of outright flavor bans suggests they have the perverse effect of increasing cigarette sales and incentivizing illicit trade. Narrative documentary demands focus on the choices made by executives, regulators, and politicians. The messier truth is that the market for nicotine, as for other recreational drugs, resists anyone’s attempts at top-down control.
Taken as a whole, Big Vape offers a far more balanced take on e-cigarettes than typical press coverage. It’s at its best as a business drama, telling the story of the rise and fall of one particular company. In that sense, it delivers exactly what it promises. The definitive story of vaping and the effort to finally end the deadly reign of the cigarette, however, remains to be told.
Jacob Grier is the author of several books, including The New Prohibition, The Rediscovery of Tobacco, and Raising the Bar.