Juul Lawsuits

People are filing Juul injury lawsuits seeking compensation for nicotine addiction, health problems and injuries from devices that exploded or caught fire. Lawyers are accepting addiction lawsuits from people who used Juul vaporizers before they turned 18 and became addicted or suffered health problems. Parents and guardians may file on behalf of children or teens.

Juul lawsuits claim the pods “deliver more highly addictive nicotine into the bloodstream at a faster rate than cigarettes.” Juul accounts for roughly seven in every 10 e-cigarettes sold in the United States. The manufacturer says each pod contains about the same amount of nicotine as a pack of 20 tobacco cigarettes.

In addition to lawsuits filed by individuals, several states filed lawsuits against Juul Labs for business practices that contributed to a youth vaping epidemic. In June 2021, the company agreed to pay $40 million to North Carolina in the first of the state settlements. Then, in December 2022, Juul agreed to pay more than $1 billion to thousands of people injured by its e-cigarettes. In March 2023, Juul agreed to pay a $23.8 million settlement to the city of Chicago to settle claims that the company sold vaping products to minors and used deceptive marketing tactics. 

As of March 16, 2023, there were 5,969 lawsuits pending in California federal court. There are also class actions that seek economic damages. 

People who have filed Juul lawsuits claim the device led to nicotine addiction or worsened their addiction when they used it to try to stop smoking. Many of the lawsuits have been filed by parents on behalf of their teenage children who used the products and later became addicted.

The lawsuits also claim that the e-cigarette’s maker engaged in deceptive marketing that hid information about nicotine content and targeted teens through social networks. Some cite a specific need for expensive addiction treatment because of the e-cigarettes.

Many of the lawsuits so far have been class actions attempting to consolidate all lawsuits within a state. Juul Labs has sought to move some of these into a Northern California federal court near where the company is headquartered.

The number of lawsuits filed since the beginning of 2019 increased steadily. On Oct. 2 2019, judges issued an order to consolidate Juul lawsuits from all over the country into multidistrict litigation, MDL-2913, in California.

Juul hit the market in 2015 and saw explosive growth following an aggressive social media marketing effort. The Washington Post reported the company’s revenues grew sevenfold in 2018 alone.

United States Surgeon General Jerome Adams said in 2018 that the problem of students vaping had become an epidemic in America. Lawsuits have cited studies of the manufacturer’s marketing practices, which appeared to be aimed at teens.

“Juul’s advertising imagery in its first six months on the market was patently youth oriented,” Stanford University School of Medicine researchers wrote in a 2019 paper.

The study by Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising also found the manufacturer had sought out high-profile social media influencers and paid them for positive reviews while insisting they not disclose the relationship.

A 2018 study in the British Medical Journal found that the manufacturer had effectively used social media to quickly gain the lion’s share of the e-cigarette market in the United States. The marketing strategy differed from previous e-cigarette advertising campaigns that used television or promotions that reached older consumers.

“We found the number of Juul-related tweets was highly correlated with quarterly retail sales of Juul,” the authors wrote.

The researchers also found slick marketing campaigns on Instagram in which images of the e-cig products were associated with “lifestyle feelings such as relaxation, freedom and sex appeal.”

A 2017 study in PloS One found that the pods may have contained 20% more nicotine than their maker had advertised.

The manufacturer did not add a nicotine warning to its Twitter feed until October 2017. Many of its early promotional emails from April 2015 through April 2016 also failed to make any mention of nicotine content.

In November 2018, Juul Labs shut down its Facebook and Instagram accounts. It has also changed how it uses Twitter and YouTube. Company CEO Kevin Burns said in a statement that the company was making changes to counteract use of its products among teens.

State attorneys general in North Carolina and Massachusetts have taken aim at some of the same marketing complaints named in Juul lawsuits. And public health groups have filed lawsuits to have the e-cig maker pay for treatment of nicotine addicted teens.

North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein filed the first state consumer lawsuit against Juul Labs in May 2019, claiming the company marketed products to minors and mislead consumers about risks.

The lawsuit says the company “played a central role in fostering the epidemic of e-cigarette use” among teens.

“Juul’s business practices are not only reckless, they’re illegal. And I intend to put a stop to them. We cannot allow another generation of young people to become addicted to nicotine,” Stein said in a statement announcing the lawsuit.

The lawsuit followed an investigation the attorney general had launched into the company’s marketing practices in October 2018.

In July 2018, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Healey announced her office was investigating Juul’s marketing and sales to minors. At the same time, she sent out cease and desist letters to two retailers selling the devices and other e-cig products online until they could set up a more secure age verification system.

“I am investigating Juul and online sellers of their products to keep these highly addictive products out of the hands of children,” Healy said in a statement.

In May 2019, Healey announced a consumer lawsuit stemming from the investigation. The suit said Eonsmoke LLC failed for years to verify the ages of online customers buying the trendy devices and other e-cigarette products. The company was one of those that received a cease and desist order the previous year.

Public health advocates at a Boston-based university announced plans to file a class action lawsuit against Juul Labs in April 2019 unless the company paid for a statewide prevention and treatment program for teens with nicotine addiction due to its products.

The lawsuit by the Public Health Advocacy Institute at Northeastern University is believed to be one of the first of its kind against the manufacturer, according to The Boston Globe.

The institute sent a letter to the company accusing it of making and selling products designed to be addictive and appealing to minors. The letter also asks Juul Labs to fund treatment and prevention programs along with research into teen e-cig addiction. The letter said if the manufacturer agreed to fund the programs within 30 days, it would hold off on filing the lawsuit.

In May 2019, a federal judge sided with several public health advocates in ordering the Food and Drug Administration to speed up its review of all brands of electronic cigarettes.

“As it turns out, even addiction has become electronic,” Judge Paul Grimm wrote in his opinion.

Six public health groups along with several individual doctors filed the lawsuit in 2018, claiming the lack of FDA oversight was allowing underage vaping to grow unchecked.

The agency has had the authority to regulate e-cigarettes since 2016 but had been slow to enforce regulations on the industry. The FDA had not planned to even begin reviewing e-cigarette products until 2021. The court decision could force the agency to begin much sooner unless it is overturned on appeal.

After reviewing studies and data provided by Juul Labs, the FDA issued a marketing denial order, also known as an MDO, in June 2022. According to the agency, the company didn’t provide enough safety data. The company couldn’t also prove that Juul products were in the best interest of public health.

The MDO stops Juul from marketing or selling its products in the U.S. However, Juul filed an emergency motion to stop the MDO, and the FDA has placed it on hold until it can review more data. In September 2022, Juul sued the FDA for refusing to disclose documents that supported the ban on its products.

In March 2023, Juul agreed to pay $23.8 million to the city of Chicago to resolve claims that the e-cigarette maker sold vaping products to minors and engaged in deceptive marketing practices. In January 2023, a California judge approved Juul’s preliminary settlement offer of $255 million to resolve a class action regarding economic loss claims. The plaintiffs claimed they would have paid less, or not purchased e-cigarettes at all, if Juul had not misrepresented its product. Estimates indicate between 200,000 and two million class members will receive payments.

In December 2022, Juul agreed to settle about 5,000 lawsuits for an undisclosed amount. After the news broke, Bloomberg reported the settlement amount was $1.2 billion, though Juul didn’t comment. In September 2022, Juul agreed to a $438. 5 million settlement with 33 states that alleged the vape maker intentionally marketed its product to children.

Several experts have compared the legal actions against the e-cig maker to the tobacco lawsuits and settlements of the 1990s and early 2000s. In February 1999, a California jury awarded a $51.5 million verdict to a smoker with inoperable lung cancer. Juries continued to award large verdicts to smokers in the years since. RJ Reynolds reported 53 verdicts against it totaling more than $375 million over a three-year period.

State attorneys general also sued tobacco companies over costs of nicotine addiction and health costs to states. Tobacco companies agreed to a $246 billion settlement with 46 states in 1998. The money would be paid out to help with smoking prevention and treatment plans for 25 years.