REVIEW:

In 2005, two Stanford University grad students - and smokers - founded a company to disrupt the nicotine marketplace by creating a ‘healthier’ device that would tempt people away from combustible cigarettes. Fifteen years, millions of vapers, and hundreds of lawsuits later, “they would be remembered not as public health saviors, but as merchants of addiction.”

So writes Time magazine reporter Jamie Ducharme in her journalistic chronicle Big Vape: The Incendiary Rise of Juul. The book follows in the footsteps of John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood and numerous other inside story looks at Silicon Valley unicorn startups. These “rise and fall” tales can be mesmerizing and often translate well to the small screen. In fact, Big Vape has already been optioned by Amblin Television for a documentary series.

The addicting (sorry) piece of Juul’s story is how much these guys screwed things up. Most notably, they clearly targeted candy-colored advertisements to kids, and they allowed Big Tobacco (Altria Group, fka Philip Morris Companies) to acquire a 35% stake. These missteps led not only to a teen vaping epidemic, but also to their ouster. Juul Labs is now run by Big Tobacco executives. It’s also losing its hip factor and being replaced by newer, cooler brands, so it seems Juul might be going up in smoke.

Big Vape is an informative exposé, though I do wish it had been structured somewhat differently. It’s primarily told in chronological order, but the introduction of lawsuit documents peppered throughout make it feel choppy and repetitive at times. As one example, I believe we’re told that Mango flavor accounts for a third of Juul pod sales on at least three occasions.

I still recommend Ducharme’s book for fans of this genre, but those who don’t read much nonfiction can catch up on a streaming service with the docuseries sometime soon.

My thanks to the author and Macmillan Audio for my gifted advance copy via NetGalley. The audiobook is confidently narrated by Sean Patrick Hopkins and clocks in at 10.5 hours. Big Vape is slated for US publication on May 25th.

PUBLISHER SYNOPSIS:

A propulsive, eye-opening work of reporting, chronicling the rise of Juul and the birth of a new addiction

It began with a smoke break. James Monsees and Adam Bowen were two ambitious graduate students at Stanford, and in between puffs after class they dreamed of a way to quit smoking. Their solution became the Juul, a sleek, modern device that could vaporize nicotine into a conveniently potent dosage. The company they built around that device, Juul Labs, would go on to become a $38 billion dollar company and draw blame for addicting a whole new generation of underage tobacco users.

Time magazine reporter Jamie Ducharme follows Monsees and Bowen as they create Juul and, in the process, go from public health visionaries and Silicon Valley wunderkinds to two of the most controversial businessmen in the country.

With rigorous reporting and clear-eyed prose that reads like a nonfiction thriller, Big Vape uses the dramatic rise of Juul to tell a larger story of big business, Big Tobacco, and the deadly cost of a product that was too good to be true.