Extract
In October 2019 an executive sacked by the electronic cigarette company, Juul, filed a lawsuit against his former employer alleging a cover-up of the sale of one million e-cigarette pods filled with contaminated flavoured nicotine liquids [1, 2]. The lawsuit also claimed that Juul was developing a “Turbo” version of their product for markets that limit nicotine levels. A new study by a team of the German Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) revealed that “Turbo” Juul devices have, in fact, been marketed in Europe since summer 2019 [3].
Abstract
Juul, the e-cigarette company, re-engineered their device for the European market, increasing nicotine delivery to US levels and adding a synthetic cooling agent to replace menthol. This approach takes advantage of insufficient EU tobacco regulation. https://bit.ly/3iixAhU
Footnotes
Conflict of interest: S. Jabba reports grants from Yale TCORS (U54DA036151), during the conduct of the study.
Conflict of interest: S-E. Jordt reports grants from National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA; U54DA036151) and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS; R01ES029435), during the conduct of the study; personal fees for consultancy from Hydra Biosciences and Sanofi, provision of research materials from GlaxoSmithKline, outside the submitted work.
Support statement: This work was supported by grant U54DA036151 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and grant R01ES029435 from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Center for Tobacco Products of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The sponsors had no role in the design and conduct of the study, collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data, preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript and decision to submit the manuscript for publication. Funding information for this article has been deposited with the Crossref Funder Registry.
- Received June 21, 2020.
- Accepted June 25, 2020.
- Copyright ©ERS 2020