In recent decades, tobacco use and nicotine addiction in the United States have steadily declined. However, the explosion in popularity of e-cigarettes and vaping threatens to reverse this trend, with youth rates spiking in the last five years. E-cigarettecompanies claim that their products are designed only to help long-term smokers switch to a safer alternative, but their modern, digital consumer acquisition strategies bear an uncanny similarity to the deceptive practices of big tobacco. By exploiting the powerful effects of addiction and sophisticated marketing, as well as the government’s delay in regulating this new tobacco product, e-cigarette manufacturers were able to sell an untested and dangerous product to a new generation of young users. Until enough time elapses to make apparent the long-term harms of products such as JUUL, tort law may struggle to effectively curb the power of e-cigarette manufacturers. Instead, ending the current crisis, as well as preventing future ones, will require innovations in both tort law and regulation, such as redefining harms in order to expand tort liability’s scope and imposing further requirements on companies attempting to bring new addictive products to market.
Thank you to our interviewees: Daniel Aaron, Jianluca Barecchia, Richard Daynard, Robin Koval, Naomi Oreskes, and Dr. Vaughan Rees.
