FDA Orders Juul To Stop Selling E-Cigarettes

“We intend to seek a stay,” Juul’s statement concluded, “and are exploring all of our options under the F.D.A.’s regulations and the law, including appealing the decision and engaging with our regulator.”Public health groups hailed the ruling. “The F.D.A.’s decision to remove all Juul products from the marketplace is both most welcomed and long overdue,” said Erika Sward, national assistant vice president of advocacy for the American Lung Association. “Juul’s campaign to target and hook kids on tobacco has gone on for far too long.”

A statement from the American Vapor Manufacturers Association, an industry trade group, hinted at the fight ahead. “Measured in lives lost and potential destroyed, F.D.A.’s staggering indifference to ordinary Americans and their right to switch to the vastly safer alternative of vaping will surely rank as one of the greatest episodes of regulatory malpractice in American history,” Amanda Wheeler, the association’s president, said in a statement.

Broadly, the F.D.A. is walking a fine line in remaking the landscape for nicotine products. It is trying to wean the public off traditional cigarettes while permitting less harmful vaping products that do not attract a new generation of users: The new devices must be appealing for smoking cessation but not so appealing that they lure young people en masse.

The agency’s ruling against Juul capped a nearly two-year review of data that the company had submitted to try to win authorization to continue selling its tobacco and menthol-flavored products in the United States. Specifically, Juul sought approval for — and the F.D.A. rejected — a Juul vaping device and four different pods, including tobacco pods with nicotine concentrations of 3 percent and 5 percent and menthol-flavored pods with the same levels.

“It’s clear that the company was given an opportunity to address questions and concerns related to safety, toxicology, and potential genotoxicity, and for whatever reason, the company was unable to meet its burden and that led to a negative marketing order,” said Mitch Zeller, a former director of the agency’s tobacco center who retired in April.

He said Juul could submit an entirely new application for a revamped product — one that presumably addressed the agency’s concerns about the leaching of chemicals. The F.D.A. began an investigation into Juul’s marketing efforts four years ago. Before that time, Juul had advertised its product using attractive young models and flavors like cool cucumber and creme brulee that critics said attracted underage users.

In April 2018, the F.D.A. announced a crackdown on the sale of such products, including Juul’s, to people under the age of 21.

Use among young people had soared. In 2017, 19 percent of 12th graders, 16 percent of 10th graders, and 8 percent of eighth-graders reported vaping nicotine in the previous year, according to Monitoring the Future, an annual survey done for the National Institute on Drug Abuse. For its part, Juul routinely denied that it targeted young people, but it was pursued in lawsuits and by state attorneys general, with some cases resulting in millions of dollars in damages against the company.

In one settlement in 2021, Juul agreed to pay $40 million to North Carolina, which represented various parties in the state who asserted the company had helped lure underage users to vape. More than a dozen other states have lawsuits and investigations that are still pending. The news is somewhat less weighty for the industry now than it would have been in Juul’s heyday, given the company’s plummeting market share. Once the dominant player with 75 percent of the market, Juul now has a considerably smaller share of the market.

But the news delivers a significant blow to Altria, formerly known as Philip Morris and the maker of Marlboro, which in December 2018 bought 35 percent of Juul for $12.8 billion. Altria made the investment to counteract slowing tobacco sales, while Juul looked to Altria as an ally to help it navigate increased regulatory scrutiny.

Neither of those strategies appears to have worked out. Altria has written down the value of its investment in Juul by more than $11 billion, to $1.7 billion. Altria, which gets about 90 percent of its revenue from smokable products, saw revenue fall slightly last year. Its stock is down more than 40 percent over the past five years, and 20 percent just in the past month. Juul, for its part, saw its revenue fall to $1.3 billion in 2021, from $2 billion in 2019, with about 95 percent in U.S. sales.

“We are disappointed with today’s decision and continue to believe that e-vapor can play an important role in harm reduction for adult smokers,” Altria said in a statement. At its peak, Juul had more than 4,000 employees. It now has slightly over 1,000, mostly in the United States, but with some in Canada, Britain, and other countries. E-cigarettes have been sold on the U.S. market for more than a decade without formal F.D.A. authorization because they did not fall under the agency’s regulatory purview for several years.

In 2019, the F.D.A. issued a warning letter to Juul, saying that the company violated federal regulations because it had not received approval to promote and sell its products as a healthier option for smoking.