How A $40B Company Went Up In Smoke, Netflix's 'Big Vape: The Rise And Fall of Juul'

Netflix's NFLX new docuseries tells the story of how a scrappy e-cigarette startup became a multi-billion dollar company that was riding high until a frightening epidemic blew its success up in smoke.

"Big Vape: The Rise and Fall of Juul" follows the meteoric ascent and epic downfall of the e-cigarette company by closely examining many of its mistakes, the most fatal of which was aggressively marketing to teens and millennials that eventually led to the vaping crisis and shortly thereafter the massive crash of Juul, valued at nearly $40 billion. Vaping nicotine is still the most common type of substance use among young people.

Directed by R.J. Cutler and based on Time reporter Jamie Ducharme’s book “Big Vape: The Incendiary Rise of Juul,” the four-part series opens with Juul's founders James Monsees and Adam Bowen as Stanford students who came up with the idea for Juul, which was to enjoy smoking without the dangers of tabacco. 

As Steven Parris, former senior VP of Philip Morris PM said, the "holy grail" was to figure out a way to generate smoke without setting the tobacco on fire. 

Monsees and Bowen experimented with a few different iterations of e-cigarettes, including PAX, which was adopted and still exists for vaping cannabis. Then they landed on the Juul model. With the help of a modest $10-million investment from Japan Tobacco International JAPAY, off they went.

Marketing To Die For

A large part of the Big Vape series looks at Juul's marketing, which focused on cool-looking young people dressed in colorful outfits enjoying Juul in various settings and moods. 

It's difficult not to compare those marketing tactics to the bad old days when cigarette ads were everywhere on TV and smoking was made to look sophisticated and glamorous, even intellectual. 

Juul did a great job of it. By 2016 celebs like Jack Nicholson, Katy Perry, Leonardo DiCaprio and many more dozens were vaping up a storm.

Then EVALI Hit

Hundreds of young people were being admitted into hospitals for e-cigarette or vaping use-associated lung injury (EVALI). As of February 2020, the CDC reported a total of 2,807 hospitalized EVALI cases or deaths in all 50 states. Health officials said vitamin E acetate, which is in some THC-containing e-cigarettes, was the primary cause of EVALI.

In terms of Juul, the docuseries tracks how several of these cases were linked to vitamin E acetate present in counterfeit or illegal THC vape products being used with Juul devices, not necessarily the Juul-produced pods themselves.

Nevertheless, like they say in the series, vaping with a Juul might be less carcinogenic than smoking a cigarette, but "that's like saying jumping out of the 15th story isn't as dangerous as jumping out of the 50th story."

Have a look at the official trailer.

Photo: Netflix