Kurt M. Ribisl, chair of the Department of Health Behavior and the Jo Anne Earp Distinguished Professor in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, on the significance of the online depository that came from North Carolina’s settlement with e-cigarette maker Juul Labs.
Kurt Ribisl has researched tobacco control since the mid-1990s, focusing on illegal tobacco sales to minors and the sales and marketing of tobacco products at stores.
When North Carolina became the first state to bring a lawsuit against Juul Labs for marketing its e-cigarettes to minors, Ribisl served as an expert witness in the case. He produced an expert report about Juul Labs’ marketing and sales practices and their lack of age verification, which required him to read more than 5,000 Juul Labs documents, including internal emails, reports to investors and discussions among the company’s founders.
The state ultimately settled with the e-cigarette maker for $47.8 million. As a part of the settlement, Juul Labs also agreed to publicly disclose roughly 4 million internal documents which will be housed on an online public depository. UNC-Chapel Hill’s University Libraries and the University of California, San Francisco will partner on the creation of the searchable depository.
Why is it important that Juul Labs internal documents be made available to the public?
RIBISL: More than 3 million documents have already been added to the UNC JUUL depository. Given the sheer number of documents, I think that the main way this information will make its way to the public will be through journalists and researchers poring over the depository, then summarizing and sharing their findings. As information from Juul Labs’ internal documents reaches the public, it will provide sunshine on how JUUL and other e-cigarette companies marketed their products to youth and young adults.
These documents could have just been kept out of the public eye, only ever seen by the juries in these lawsuits, but that would have been so unfortunate. It’s important that researchers and the public understand exactly how Juul Labs targeted youth, so we can prevent it from ever happening again.
The internal documents revealed widespread issues like how Juul Labs was actively engaged in social media marketing, even hiring popular young influencers and celebrities to promote their products, despite knowing that a large portion of their social media followers were underage. Juul Labs had studied which flavors appeal to youth, and many of those flavors were used in their vape products. They also took steps to make their products more appealing to minors by offering them in the same popular colors that were available for iPhones. Documents revealed that when the company became aware of stores selling Juul products to minors, it did little to prevent these sales. Even when stores were repeatedly found to sell to kids, Juul Labs didn’t significantly punish them or cut off the supply of JUUL devices or refillable pods.
These details may seem shocking, but they are true, and allowing them to become public knowledge helps keep history from repeating itself. Thanks to the online depository, the public now has a behind-the-scenes look at how Juul Labs became the leading youth e-cigarette brand.
Distinguished and named professorships support renowned scholars and propel research at Carolina. These privately funded endowments help attract and retain the academic leaders of today, ensuring a state-of-the-art education for all Tar Heels.
As told to Audrey Smith ’10
Photo courtesy of UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center
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