Speaker 1: Despite all the evidence of why I should, despite all
Speaker 1: the you know, family history, etcetera, etcetera. I knew I
Speaker 1: was never going to quit smoking, like that was pretty
Speaker 1: much it. And then this mirrorgal comes along and I
Speaker 1: quit smoking. Jennifer Bergman Coleman is not talking about a
Speaker 1: pill or a patch or smoking cessation plan. She's talking
Speaker 1: about vaping, or specifically jeweling. Jeweling is a high tech
Speaker 1: way to inhale nicotine without burning tobacco like a regular cigarette.
Speaker 1: And this is how Jewel says its product is supposed
Speaker 1: to work getting addicted smokers like Jennifer to finally quit.
Speaker 1: But along the way, Jewel got a lot bigger than that,
Speaker 1: taking off not just with smokers but with teenagers. It
Speaker 1: became a social media sensation. YEA, what's going on, everybody?
Speaker 1: It's downy Smokes coming back at you guys with another
Speaker 1: video today. So in this video today, what we got
Speaker 1: is how to make your experience with the Jewel right.
Speaker 1: Many of these videos looked like they were made by
Speaker 1: someone underaged, so people have started to worry teens were
Speaker 1: getting addicted to nicotine, many of whom had never smoked before.
Speaker 1: It is a an adolescent public health crisis happening before
Speaker 1: our eyes in real time, and no one is doing
Speaker 1: anything fast enough to stop it. Parents like Meredith Berkman,
Speaker 1: but also doctors and regulators have begun drawing up the
Speaker 1: battle lines. They believe something has to be done now
Speaker 1: to get Jewel out of the hands of their children,
Speaker 1: and the blowback is about to be fierce. Hi, I'm
Speaker 1: peg Akari and I'm olivia' Zeleski, and this week on Decrypted,
Speaker 1: as part of our special season, we're exploring the unintended
Speaker 1: consequences of technology, and we're talking about Jewel. The company
Speaker 1: says it only ever wanted to help else quit smoking. Instead,
Speaker 1: it's set off a teen sensation over vaping, but regulators
Speaker 1: and parents like Meredith aren't buying it. Investigators want to
Speaker 1: know was the company marketing to teens on purpose, and
Speaker 1: critics are calling for vaping products to be pulled from
Speaker 1: the market to stop them from falling into the hands
Speaker 1: of underage users. That has customers like Jennifer up in
Speaker 1: arms because they say that by helping them quit smoking,
Speaker 1: Jewel has essentially saved their lives. Stay with us. Jewel
Speaker 1: has been around for some time. The idea first originated
Speaker 1: in two thousand and five, Adam Bowen and James Monzi's
Speaker 1: to Stanford graduate students. Were both addicted smokers, and they
Speaker 1: used to swap business ideas on smoke breaks between classes.
Speaker 1: One day they landed on an idea to disrupt big tobacco,
Speaker 1: and eventually they came up with what we see to day,
Speaker 1: a penlike device with a pod or cottridge filled with
Speaker 1: a tobacco infused liquid. Users suck on the pen, which
Speaker 1: causes the pod to heat, delivering a powerful blast of
Speaker 1: nicotine into the lungs and then straight to the inhalance brain.
Speaker 1: Pods first came in flavors like cool mint and crembroulet.
Speaker 1: Adam and James name their product Jewel because it conjured
Speaker 1: up the image of a rare gemstone. A jewel is
Speaker 1: also a unit of energy. In June of twenty fifteen,
Speaker 1: Adam and James launched their product to the masses with
Speaker 1: a now infamous marketing campaign. It was full of bright
Speaker 1: colors and models looking like college students. Many were wearing
Speaker 1: letterman jackets and crop tops and high ponytails, and the
Speaker 1: campaign appeared mainly on Instagram. But still the company says
Speaker 1: Jewel was always meant for adults and more specifically addicted
Speaker 1: cigarette smokers, and that's how Jennifer began using it. Jennifer, Hi,
Speaker 1: you've never been here before, right, Okay, this is Bloomberg. Welcome.
Speaker 1: I first met Jennifer this summer after I had connected
Speaker 1: with the American Bathing Association. On a sunny Saturday morning,
Speaker 1: Jennifer came over to Bloomberg San Francisco office on the
Speaker 1: piers and we sat and chatted about her struggles with
Speaker 1: nicotine addiction, which started at an early age. The time
Speaker 1: I smoked my first cigarette, I was probably ten years old.
Speaker 1: I became a daily smoker probably somewhere between fifteen and sixteen.
Speaker 1: I probably was close to a pack a day, maybe
Speaker 1: a half a pack of pack a day when I
Speaker 1: was in high school. Jennifer is actually a nurse, and
Speaker 1: she's a mother of two teenagers herself, and she wasn't
Speaker 1: the only one in her family who smoked. Jennifer's father
Speaker 1: is a chain smoker, and his smoking has caused him
Speaker 1: to have both his legs amputated. That had a profound
Speaker 1: effect on Jennifer, but she really couldn't quit. People think, oh,
Speaker 1: it's just so easy to quit. It's such a dirty
Speaker 1: habit just quit know, and it's not that simple. I
Speaker 1: tried everything. I tried the patches, I tried the gum.
Speaker 1: I tried the patches together with the gum. I tried
Speaker 1: the medications. I tried chewing on toothpigs and hard candy,
Speaker 1: you know, all the things they tell you to do. Eventually,
Speaker 1: she tried vaping. At some point, I just kind of felt, well,
Speaker 1: I should maybe give this a try. A single jewel
Speaker 1: pod contains as much nicotine as a pack of twenty
Speaker 1: regular cigarettes. This is probably the closest thing that you
Speaker 1: would get to drawing on a cigarette where you inhale
Speaker 1: it into your mouth than into your lungs. Jennifer says
Speaker 1: this gives her a nicotine fixed without smelling like cigarettes
Speaker 1: and experiencing that social stigma of smoking. She also believes
Speaker 1: it's a lot better for her. One day, I just
Speaker 1: kind of knew I was done. I had a couple
Speaker 1: of cigarettes left and I threw them away. I was like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm done. It took about a year or so for
Speaker 1: sales of Jewels vaping devices to pick up. The company
Speaker 1: showed me a chart of its sales, and there's a
Speaker 1: point in about late when the bars on the chart
Speaker 1: just begin to rise a lot. By January seen Jewel
Speaker 1: says sales were up six hundred and twenty and it
Speaker 1: was emerging as one of the most significant players in
Speaker 1: the East cigarette market, and the product was going pretty viral.
Speaker 1: Jeweling had become a verb. It was a sensation on
Speaker 1: social media. Everyone at my school jewels and it. If
Speaker 1: you don't know what a jewel is, it's like this
Speaker 1: little black vape thing. Describe it's basically just vaping and
Speaker 1: you get super bussed off of it. How to juwel?
Speaker 1: How do you jewel in school? How to jewel for
Speaker 1: the first time? All right, let's check it out. Jewel
Speaker 1: sash damn? How the are your cloud so big? How
Speaker 1: are you going so milky? More? More more tips with
Speaker 1: the jewel? Like, actually, I kind of want to take another.
Speaker 1: This is pretty good. This is I haven't hit this amazing.
Speaker 1: These are just a few of the hundreds of videos
Speaker 1: online of teens and young twentysomethings talking about how much
Speaker 1: they love Jewel and this was the problem. Jewell says
Speaker 1: it designed its products for people like Jennifer, who used
Speaker 1: it to kick her cigarette habit, but its explosion in
Speaker 1: sales wasn't just coming from smoker's looking to quit. Last year,
Speaker 1: thirty six percent of high school students said they had
Speaker 1: tried vaping, according to a report from the University of Michigan.
Speaker 1: Reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say
Speaker 1: that electronic cigarettes are the most commonly used tobacco product
Speaker 1: among high school students. That's a pretty scary prospect for
Speaker 1: a lot of parents with teenage kids. Many parents now
Speaker 1: find themselves completely consumed with, unfortunately, what is arguably the
Speaker 1: most pressing American public health issues, certainly for kids. That's
Speaker 1: Meredith Berkman. She's a mom in New York City. Meredith
Speaker 1: has four children. Her older kids are already in their teens.
Speaker 1: Meredith says she doesn't think her own kids vape, but
Speaker 1: over the last year, she and two other moms she
Speaker 1: know started hearing a lot more about it. Individually. We
Speaker 1: had all heard a little bit of bits and pieces
Speaker 1: about East cigarettes, vaping. Maybe we'd heard about jeweling, but
Speaker 1: we really didn't know much about it. We knew it
Speaker 1: was something we should learn about, but it really wasn't
Speaker 1: on um on our radar. Meredith and her concerned friends
Speaker 1: started doing a bit of research. They started reading articles
Speaker 1: online and then they moved to reading academic studies, and
Speaker 1: Meredith said, the next thing she knew they were contacting
Speaker 1: experts because what they were discovering was really alarming. We
Speaker 1: all three came to the realization that it was something
Speaker 1: so important that we had better, um join, you know,
Speaker 1: a parents education and advocacy group out there, so we
Speaker 1: could educate ourselves and potentially educate others who knew even
Speaker 1: less than we did. And then there was this moment
Speaker 1: of realization that there was not such a group that existed.
Speaker 1: In March, Mary that started Parents Against Vaping East Cigarettes
Speaker 1: or paved with those two other moms to advocate against
Speaker 1: Yule and other East cigarette companies. PAVE has a website
Speaker 1: that educates parents and organizes events at schools to give
Speaker 1: parents and members of the media information on vaping. Meredith
Speaker 1: says her biggest fear is that vaping is going to
Speaker 1: have negative health consequences further down the line, and that
Speaker 1: the technology is so new that its impact hasn't been
Speaker 1: fully understood yet. People have said to us, well, this
Speaker 1: is not the opioid crisis, and no one is going
Speaker 1: to die. And this is not mothers against drunk driving,
Speaker 1: and you know, God forbid, right, But the reality is
Speaker 1: we don't know. I'm not a public health expert, but
Speaker 1: I am a mom of four kids, and I know
Speaker 1: an important issue that affects my children and other women's children,
Speaker 1: other people's children when I see one, and so you know,
Speaker 1: we're sort of accidental public health care advocates. So it's
Speaker 1: true these products are very new, but there's a chorus
Speaker 1: of experts who say jeweling poses clear health risks to teenagers.
Speaker 1: And that's because every Jewel pod contains so much nicotine.
Speaker 1: There's plenty of evidence showing that nicotine is very harmful
Speaker 1: to the developing brain. That's Dr Bonnie Halpern Felscher, developmental
Speaker 1: psychologist and professor at Stanford in the Division of Adolescent
Speaker 1: Medicine and Pediatrics. Bonnie studies how environmental factors influence adolescent
Speaker 1: decision making around nicotine products. The developing brain basically continues
Speaker 1: until somebody is in their mid twenties. So you take
Speaker 1: somebody a sixteen, they have a brain that's still malleable,
Speaker 1: it's still plastic, so to speed, it's still developing. Bonnie
Speaker 1: explained to me that two important things are happening in
Speaker 1: the teenage brain. First, there's a process called pruning going on,
Speaker 1: Bonnie says. That's the brain shedding away parts it doesn't
Speaker 1: need anymore. And the second process called milonization. That's a
Speaker 1: process in which a sheath is created over a neuron
Speaker 1: to make it work or fire better. Bonnie says that
Speaker 1: because these processes happen during adolescence, teens have an easier
Speaker 1: time becoming deeply addicted to nicotine. It hijacks the pleasure
Speaker 1: of rewards of the brain, and the body says I
Speaker 1: like this, and I'm going to change, and your brain
Speaker 1: actually changes to accommodate and to take in that nicotine.
Speaker 1: And because it's addictive, there are consequences for people whose
Speaker 1: brains are exposed to too much nicotine. Specifically, it creates
Speaker 1: withdrawal symptoms and the feeling of needing more and more
Speaker 1: nicotine For teenagers who would never smoke as in the
Speaker 1: first place. Jewel has been accused of pulling in young
Speaker 1: users with its high nicotine content and effectively turning them
Speaker 1: into customers for life people. Young people who are using
Speaker 1: Jewel today never planned on smoking a cigarette. So this
Speaker 1: so called harm reduction, that's not the question with young people.
Speaker 1: Young people, it's fresh air versus vapes. On top of this,
Speaker 1: East cigarettes are still so new to the market that
Speaker 1: we don't yet know what other health risks could come
Speaker 1: up down the line. So a lot of parents like
Speaker 1: Meredith have focused their attention on restricting access, including cracking
Speaker 1: down on Jewels flavored pods. Jewel currently sells eight flavors.
Speaker 1: Two of these, Virginia Tobacco and Classic Tobacco, taste almost
Speaker 1: like cigarettes. The other six mango, cucumber, menthal mint, fruit
Speaker 1: and cream. And Meredith feels it's just no coincidence at
Speaker 1: all that some of jewels flavors taste almost like candy.
Speaker 1: And we also know from emerging research that kids who
Speaker 1: begin jeweling are three point eight almost four times more
Speaker 1: likely to begin smoking conventional cigarettes than non jeweling kids.
Speaker 1: If this were really just solely and UM a smoking
Speaker 1: cessation device, why would you want flavors? Why would you
Speaker 1: want to UM hook people to the flavors. So that's
Speaker 1: how I would answer that we are not interested in
Speaker 1: banning the Jewel for adults, but what we're interested in
Speaker 1: doing is closing the loophole. Many of the health advocates
Speaker 1: and doctors I've spoken to feel the same way. If
Speaker 1: the flavors of the pods were it so sweet and tasty,
Speaker 1: maybe teenagers wouldn't find vaping is appealing. The debate over
Speaker 1: flavors cuts to the heart of the controversy surrounding jewel.
Speaker 1: One camp says a medical device shouldn't need to market
Speaker 1: itself as delicious, just effective. The other side says addicts
Speaker 1: need the flavors to quit. Like Jennifer, she said the
Speaker 1: flavors made it easy to start using the product when
Speaker 1: every other smoking cessation device just felt like a chore.
Speaker 1: Upwards of somewhere between eighty five and eight of people
Speaker 1: said that the flavors the availability of flavors where the
Speaker 1: key element in getting them to quit smoking, and the
Speaker 1: availability of those are a very important part of how
Speaker 1: people quit. So that's the case for flavoring. Because it
Speaker 1: worked for Jennifer, she became an activist. She worked with
Speaker 1: the American Vaping Association to advocate against regulation and she's
Speaker 1: not alone. When we met Jennifer, she said she had
Speaker 1: joined about fifty vaping groups on Facebook alan and she's
Speaker 1: found a large community on other social networks like Instagram.
Speaker 1: She's part of a pro vaping movement. Meanwhile, Meredith and
Speaker 1: scores of other parents across the country had set up
Speaker 1: their own advocacy groups, and four sets of parents were
Speaker 1: lining up to sue the company, arguing that its flavors
Speaker 1: were hooking their kids. But as this battle was playing out,
Speaker 1: a larger threat to Jewel was forming. It was coming
Speaker 1: from cities, states, and the federal government itself. America's largest
Speaker 1: e cigarette makers under fire this morning. One state now
Speaker 1: investigating whether Jewel markets to teenagers. After a series of
Speaker 1: lawsuits accusing the company of trying to hook teens, State
Speaker 1: Attorney General Mora Healy's office has launched an investigation into
Speaker 1: a Jewel e cigarette maker. The Attorney General held a
Speaker 1: news conference. The first investigations came from state regulators in Massachusetts.
Speaker 1: They were asking questions about the sale of Jewels flavors,
Speaker 1: as well as the company's early marketing campaigns. Mississippi's Attorney General,
Speaker 1: Jim Hood, is also asking questions. Then, over the summer,
Speaker 1: in the company's hometown of San Francisco, voters resoundingly supported
Speaker 1: a ban on flavored tobacco products. All of This was
Speaker 1: happening right after Jewel hit one of the biggest milestones
Speaker 1: there is for a startup. It raised one point to
Speaker 1: billion dollars from tech investors to fund the next stage
Speaker 1: of the company's growth, and according to those negotiations, Jewell
Speaker 1: was said to be worth fifteen billion dollars. It was
Speaker 1: June and I had just started covering Jewel, and this
Speaker 1: funding round was shocking. It's just so much money, And
Speaker 1: to put those numbers in perspective, it meant investors thought
Speaker 1: Jewel was as valuable as Lift, the ride hailing company,
Speaker 1: or twice as much as Slack, the mobile messaging platform.
Speaker 1: Yet this company's products had only been on the market
Speaker 1: for three years. In June, Jewel said it had captured
Speaker 1: sixty eight percent of the U S East cigarette business.
Speaker 1: This is especially impressive if you consider that East cigarettes
Speaker 1: are generally thought to be the future of the regular
Speaker 1: cigarette market, which brought in about a hundred and five
Speaker 1: billion in the US last year. Through the summit, Silicon
Speaker 1: Valley was buzzing with talk about Jewel. The company seemed
Speaker 1: poised for a continued growth set despite the probe and
Speaker 1: Massachusetts and lawsuits from parents. Most people I was talking
Speaker 1: to expressed confidence that the company would move past these hurdles,
Speaker 1: and the culture and Silicon Valley has in the past
Speaker 1: been very encouraging of companies that push the limits of
Speaker 1: existing regulation, like that's the approach companies like Uba took,
Speaker 1: and for a time that was considered to be a
Speaker 1: smart strategy. Then in September, the real bombshell hit. The
Speaker 1: freaking Drug Administration says it is preparing to launch a
Speaker 1: campaign to discourage teens from using East cigarettes. The f
Speaker 1: d A is also investigating the marketing strategies and impact
Speaker 1: of several vaping products, including the most popular e cigarette, Jewel.
Speaker 1: Federal regulators, the American Food and Drug Administration's Commissioner, Scott Gottlieb,
Speaker 1: Sensual and four other e cigarette companies a scathing letter.
Speaker 1: He gave the cigarette companies sixty days to submit quote
Speaker 1: robust plans for how they'll stop teens from using their products.
Speaker 1: And this was a big reversal because only last year
Speaker 1: the FDA decided that the cigarette companies didn't have to
Speaker 1: submit products for review until then. In early October, the
Speaker 1: FDA said it collected more than a thousand pages of
Speaker 1: documents from Jewels offices in an unannounced on site inspection.
Speaker 1: The company, for its part, says that teen us has
Speaker 1: never been allowed and that bad actors are the ones
Speaker 1: who are responsible for selling jewel to kids. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of of unauthorized illegal reselling on other marketplaces with
Speaker 1: no age verification. That's Ashley gold Jewels chief administrative officer
Speaker 1: and the executive who has been at the forefront of
Speaker 1: defending jewel publicly. What she's saying here is a critical
Speaker 1: part of jewels defense. Teens really shouldn't be able to
Speaker 1: get ahold of this product in the first place. Ashley said,
Speaker 1: teens are buying jewels and jewel pods from law breaking
Speaker 1: vape shops and these online resellers think eBay, Ali Baba,
Speaker 1: Amazon and even Walmart dot com. We have a technological
Speaker 1: solution where we scraped the Internet every day and send
Speaker 1: automated stustans and assist letters to these online market places.
Speaker 1: The people who are posting are trying to make it
Speaker 1: not look like they're selling our product. So sometimes we
Speaker 1: see they'll add you know, any at the end, or
Speaker 1: there they'll add a dollar sign, or they'll try to
Speaker 1: make it so that whatever systems these online marketplaces put
Speaker 1: in place to say you can't post Jewel product that
Speaker 1: they somehow get around it. And here's what happens. When
Speaker 1: someone buys product directly from Jewel's website, the company checks
Speaker 1: the buyer's age by matching the credit card details to
Speaker 1: public records. You also have to take a picture of
Speaker 1: yourself holding your government I D which must also match
Speaker 1: the government databases. But the company is going to have
Speaker 1: to do more than that to satisfy the f d
Speaker 1: A and angry parents. I asked Ashley about whether Jewel
Speaker 1: has a plan and what it looks like. She said
Speaker 1: the company is exploring a technological solution to the problem.
Speaker 1: The idea is that each East cigarette would be linked
Speaker 1: to a smartphone. People using Jewel would have to prove
Speaker 1: through an app on their smartphone that they're of age
Speaker 1: to use the product, and this would make it harder
Speaker 1: for an underage person to use Jewel illegally. If you
Speaker 1: are an underage user and somebody of age purchased the
Speaker 1: product for you and gave it to you, then maybe
Speaker 1: thirty days later the device stops working. In order to
Speaker 1: reactivate it, you have to go through our online age
Speaker 1: verification process through an app, so that in order to
Speaker 1: reactivate the device, you have to prove to us that
Speaker 1: you're of age to use it. I think that that
Speaker 1: technology could be revolutionary, Olivia. It basically sounds like Jewel
Speaker 1: is putting a tracking device into its product. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: maybe that's a good thing to stop teens from using.
Speaker 1: When Ashley Gold described the technology to me, I thought, well,
Speaker 1: if Jewel is really serious about cutting back on team use,
Speaker 1: this maybe could work. The question is whether the US
Speaker 1: government will allow them to do it. Jewel said the
Speaker 1: product requires pre approval from the FDA, and the agency
Speaker 1: might be unwilling to let them launch a whole new
Speaker 1: product in the US. Yeah. I get the sense they're
Speaker 1: not quite sure if Jewel had bad intentions or not,
Speaker 1: and whether it deliberately tried to appeal to a younger
Speaker 1: audience through its ad campaigns and those sweet flavors. But
Speaker 1: we understand that those ads reflect the colors and a
Speaker 1: lifestyle sort of image that is really not consistent with
Speaker 1: our messaging and it's not something, frankly, that we would
Speaker 1: launch today. Um, but that doesn't mean that the company
Speaker 1: had bad intentions. So, Olivia, because this is the unintended
Speaker 1: consequences season of decrypted. I think we have to stop
Speaker 1: and usk is this situation that Jewels in with all
Speaker 1: its appeal to teenagers, is it truly unintended? You know,
Speaker 1: it's hard to say, but what we do know is
Speaker 1: that when the company was created, James and Adam, the founders,
Speaker 1: were pretty young themselves, and I think they were sort
Speaker 1: of in this campus college community where they weren't really
Speaker 1: interacting with many teenagers. Um, they were sort of thinking
Speaker 1: about themselves and designing a product that was just right
Speaker 1: for them. You know, the backlash has been growing really
Speaker 1: through the summit, but the rise in sales has been
Speaker 1: going on for you know, maybe eighteen months at this point,
Speaker 1: and Jewel hasn't done things that it could have done
Speaker 1: perhaps to address teen sales earlier, Like they haven't made
Speaker 1: it harder for people to buy huge volumes of that
Speaker 1: product at once. Yeah. I found that really interesting too.
Speaker 1: You think that it would be so easy to say, well,
Speaker 1: we're not going to sell a hundred packs to a
Speaker 1: single online distributor, or if we do sell to a
Speaker 1: vape shop, we're going to kind of keep an eye
Speaker 1: on how much product we're moving to them. I asked
Speaker 1: the company about this and I have to be honest.
Speaker 1: They didn't have a great answer, so I hope that
Speaker 1: they're working on that. I mean, the other thing that
Speaker 1: I thought about was the situation with pods, because Jewel
Speaker 1: says it has a big issue with counterfeit pods on
Speaker 1: the market, huge issue, and you know, that's something it
Speaker 1: they told me, is that they're getting all the heat.
Speaker 1: They're getting all the backlash for selling pods that are
Speaker 1: bubble gum flavored, for example, but actually Jewel doesn't even
Speaker 1: make a bubble gum flavored pod. They said that those
Speaker 1: are coming from counterfeit companies. You know, I spoke to
Speaker 1: a ton of parents who really were up in arms,
Speaker 1: like how can we trust this company that makes bubble
Speaker 1: gum flavored pod that's so clearly targeted to a teenager?
Speaker 1: And I told them, you know, actually Jewel doesn't make that.
Speaker 1: That's a counterfeit product. And they were really surprised to
Speaker 1: hear that. So, you know, Jewel does have this problem
Speaker 1: where it's sort of guilty by association, and it begs
Speaker 1: the question when a company is valued over fifteen billion dollars,
Speaker 1: like how much of that is their responsibility even if
Speaker 1: they're not making the product themselves. It's still their brand,
Speaker 1: and maybe they need to do more to clamp down
Speaker 1: on counterfeit products UM. One thing I'll tell you quickly
Speaker 1: is that UM Jewel earlier this month just filed the
Speaker 1: complaint with the US International Trade Commission saying that over
Speaker 1: fifteen UM company and mainly in China and some of
Speaker 1: the United States and France, are just blatantly developing and
Speaker 1: selling products that are counterfeits based on jewels patented technology,
Speaker 1: and they're asking the i t C to do way
Speaker 1: more to stop the import of these products. So, as
Speaker 1: of this taping Olivia, we're still a few weeks away
Speaker 1: from the FDA's deadline for Jewel to submit those plans
Speaker 1: for stopping teens from using its product. How big a
Speaker 1: threat do you think this could this investigation could be
Speaker 1: to the company. I think it's a huge threat. I
Speaker 1: think it not only m is hurting morale internally at
Speaker 1: the company of people are afraid of what will happen.
Speaker 1: It's stressful, but you know, it could really clamp down
Speaker 1: on their business if they get rid of flavored pods.
Speaker 1: That's UM a large revenue source for them, and you know,
Speaker 1: perhaps people will then end up going to smaller companies
Speaker 1: that have flavored pods, or they'll just buy the counterfeit ones. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and ultimately it might be tough for Jewel to convince
Speaker 1: regulators that anything short of eliminating flavors will be enough.
Speaker 1: That would be a blow for people like Jennif who
Speaker 1: think the flavors are the key to helping her quit. Yeah.
Speaker 1: When I spoke to her, she said she believes quitting
Speaker 1: smoking has really benefited her family and that the solution
Speaker 1: to the problem of teenage use should involve doing a
Speaker 1: better job of making sure age restrictions are enforced. It's
Speaker 1: already illegal for children to smoke or vape, so the
Speaker 1: only thing you're doing by passing these laws is restricting
Speaker 1: adult access from people who want to quit. And what
Speaker 1: about the kids? What about their parents? What about their
Speaker 1: parents who are dying unnecessarily of tobacco related illnesses? You know,
Speaker 1: then what are you going to do with those kids? Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: doctors and parents like Meredith Berkman want regulators to intervene.
Speaker 1: They just don't believe that Jewel can really be trusted
Speaker 1: to help solve a problem that it essentially created. The
Speaker 1: moment is now, if we don't act now quickly, we
Speaker 1: will have an entire generation of children addicted to nicotine.
Speaker 1: Why are you waiting even one more day? Because every
Speaker 1: day that goes by, more and more teens are becoming addicted.
Speaker 1: And that's it for this week's Decrypted. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: Do you use juel or do you know a young
Speaker 1: person who does. We want to hear from you. You
Speaker 1: can email us at Decrypted at Bloomberg dot net or
Speaker 1: I'm on Twitter at Olivia Zeleski and I'm at piagad Cary.
Speaker 1: If you're a fan of the show, please take a
Speaker 1: moment to rate and review us. It really helps new
Speaker 1: listeners find the show. This episode was produced by piagad Cary,
Speaker 1: Magnus Hendrickson, and Austin Weinstein. Our story editors were Emily
Speaker 1: Busso and a vanderm Thanks also to Bradstone, Aki Ito
Speaker 1: and Liz Smith. Francesco Levie is head of Bloomberg Podcast.
Speaker 1: We'll see you here next week. M