The Lamar County School District has joined a class action lawsuit against JUUL – a San Francisco-based manufacturer of e-cigarettes and accessories – that alleges the company has targeted school-age children with its products, leading to underage vaping at schools across the country.
The school district’s board of trustees voted on Aug. 10 to join the suit, which is being handled by Frantz Law Group out of Los Angeles and accuses JUUL of design defect, failure to warn, negligence and being a public nuisance. The suit states that the cigarette industry has a long history of marketing to young people under the age of 21, but while “Big Tobacco” is prohibited from many marketing tactics promoting cigarette use among young people, JUUL has been allowed to implement those strategies in order to build their customer base.
“The lawsuit says that JUUL has targeted teenagers,” school board attorney Rick Norton said. “They’ve got a large, large share of the market – I think it’s 70 or 80 percent of the market of e-cigarettes for those under 21 years of age.
“And it has caused problems in our schools, with kids trying to vape between classes, before school, after school, et cetera. The lawsuit is asking for JUUL to stop targeting teenagers, and that’s the primary purpose.”
The lawsuit specifically refers to the Montebello Unified School District in California, which it says has been required to redirect valuable school resources, and administrators have had to strategize on how to best deal with the JUUL problem. Some schools have responded by taking extreme measures such as removing bathroom doors or shutting bathrooms down.
“Schools have had to ban flash drives to avoid any confusion between flash drives and JUULS,” the suit states. “Schools have also paid thousands of dollars to install special monitors to detect vaping, or pay for the costs of plumbing repairs spent as a result of students flushing vaping paraphernalia down toilets.
“Other school districts have sought to create new positions for tobacco prevention supervisors, who get alerts when vape smoke is detected in bathrooms. In order to implement … anti-vaping programs, teachers have to prepare lessons and study materials for these sessions with information on the marketing and health dangers of vaping – extra work which requires teachers to work extra hours in addition to the work required for the normal curriculum.”
The suit goes on to say vaping hurts individual student learning and has led to a rise in student absences because of sickness.
“In addition to skipping class or being late to class to address their addiction, students often share vape devices, which accelerates the spread of viruses and other illnesses that impact student attendance,” the suit states. “The district has had students end up in the emergency room as a result of vaping at school.”
The suit states that a 2015 JUUL advertising campaign was particularly designed to appeal to young people, as the advertisements in that campaign included bright colors and models in their 20s posing in manners that were meant to evoke those of underage teenagers rather than adults. JUUL also has advertised on the front page of VICE Magazine, which has marketed itself as the “No. 1 youth media company in the world.”
The lawsuit goes on to say that JUUL further targeted youth by manufacturing, selling, and promoting an array of youth-oriented flavors for its JUUL pods, which came in flavors including mango, fruit medley, cool mint, cool cucumber and crème brulee. According to one survey, 81 percent of youth e-cigarette users reported the first product they used was flavored, and 81.5 percent reported product flavoring as a reason for use.
In addition, JUUL has also purchased banner advertisements on children’s television networks, including Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, as well as websites for children such as allfreekidscrafts.com, hellokids.com and kidsgamheroes.com.
“JUUL also purchased advertisements on a range of websites designed to help middle school and high school students develop their mathematics and social skill studies,” the lawsuit states. “JUUL purchased advertisements on websites for high school students hoping to attend college, such as colleconfidential.com and collegereview.com.
“JUUL targeted college students with its paid online advertisements and purchased video advertisements on sites such as collegehumor.com and thecollegeprepstercom, as well as banner ads on survivingcollege.com. The teen vaping epidemic, which JUUL has had a massive influence in creating and maintaining, has and will continue to have significant costs, both for individual users and for society overall.”
In addition, JUUL held more than 50 parties in cities across the United States in the first year after its 2015 launch, at which young attendees were give free nicotine-filled JUUL pods. Afterwards, the company posted pictures of various young people using the products across its various social media channels.
“JUUL’s marketing also included attractive young people distributing free JUULs at movie and music events,” the suit states. “(A) Stanford Report identified at least 25 JUUL ‘youth-oriented’ entertainment events, usually either music or cinema themed, whose primary purpose was to distribute free samples of JUUL devices and flavor pods to a youthful audience.
“The average number of samples distributed at events equals 5,000 JUUL starter kits. That equates to 20,000 packs of cigarettes at each event, or 500,000 packs of cigarettes total. Although JUUL claims its marketing changed after 2015, in December 2017 JUUL tweeted an invitation for a ‘demo event’ for $1 in Miami. And in April 2018, JUUL promoted an event where new users could learn ‘how to use your device and sample #juulpod flavors.’”
The suit requests compensatory damages, costs to abate or mitigate vaping, injunctive relief and abatement, punitive damages, reasonable attorney’s fees, statutory pre-judgment, costs of the suit, and any and all other relief allowed by the court.
“The secondary focus (of the suit) is to reimburse school districts for the cost of taking the extra time and personnel that they’ve had to use to deal with the vaping problem in schools,” Norton said. “There are going to be hundreds and hundreds of school districts to join in the class action litigation.
“It’s the same thing that was done with silica and asbestos and tobacco and other things like that, so that’s sort of the pattern for it.”
