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You're watching CNBC On Demand.

In this episode of American Greed, for years an epidemic of teenage nicotine

addiction sweeps the country.

They think now the it thing for teens. The FDA today calling it a dangerous

epidemic. Leaving thousands of kids now fighting to get clean.

I'm 10 hours in.

It's hard.

And the culprit blamed for this ongoing public health crisis?

An e -cigarette called Juul.

With nearly 75 % market share, e -cigarette maker Juul has become enemy

one. It's not like millions of kids using e -cigarettes generally.

Like, they're all using Juul.

Meet the minds behind the life -altering invention.

James Monsies and Adam Bowen. Two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who grow

business faster than Facebook.

Hitting a value of $38 billion in just four years by selling one of the most

addictive drugs on the legal market.

If you talk to some adults, they'll say, it was easier for me to get off of

cocaine or heroin than to get off of my cigarettes.

Bowen and Montes insist they are good guys working to save the lives of

I think the real opportunity here is to improve the lives of a billion people

worldwide.

But critics say they target kids and create a new generation of addicts.

nothing but a marketer of a poison.

And while they are at it, they get fabulously rich.

And as a result, they've made combined billions of dollars. And it's just not

right.

It is a drive for profits that earns the makers of Juul a place on American

greed. As we work to answer the question, what matters more to Bowen and

Monsies? The mission for the money.

In 2018, a public health crisis is racing through high schools across the

country.

And in North Carolina, the state's attorney general, Josh Stein, hears

stories about children in his state who are vaping.

They got addicted. Their grades plummeted. They got kicked off sports

They had to switch schools. They had to seek medical counseling or treatment for

their addiction.

He decides to investigate.

I came back to the office and I said to my team, what is going on here?

We have to look into what's happening.

And that investigation, he says, leads to a multi -billion dollar enterprise

that leaves families across the country in crisis.

In 2005, in Silicon Valley, where dreams to change the world come true, the

seeds of an ambitious plan to save the lives of one billion people take hold.

It comes from two students at Stanford University's product design program,

James Monses and Adam Bowen.

They are smart, creative, and have much in common.

I ended up with a degree in physics and a minor in studio art. I double majored

in physics and studio art.

And they also share two more interests that will chart their futures.

One is a common goal to do good in the world, and the other, an addiction to

cigarettes.

In a series of interviews with CNBC over two years, they share their story.

Both of us were conflicted smokers. We both exercise a lot, eat well, but still

smoking.

Still smoking, even though they know it is the largest preventable cause of

death in the world.

According to the CDC, more than 400 ,000 people in the United States die from

smoking every year.

They realize that these burning sticks hanging from their mouth are idiotic.

Lauren Etter is an investigative journalist who writes a book about

Bowen. They started wondering, why hasn't anybody innovated the cigarette?

Suddenly, in their deadly habit, Bowen and Monsi see a phenomenal opportunity

do good, to create a product that replaces cigarettes.

It's hard to imagine an area that can be more powerful

to public health in particular than to eliminate cigarettes from the face of

earth.

Powerful and potentially very lucrative. And so there are two goals here.

So not only do they have their public health mission, like this is a product

that can save lives, but wow, there are one billion smokers in the world.

And if we can grab a tiny piece of that market, we will be rich.

And in Silicon Valley, getting rich is the name of the game.

And Bowen and Monsi's head out to search for investors.

As we're trying to raise more money, they're really leaning into their

because this is what gives a sheen of morality to the company, essentially, by

telling investors, no, we're not a tobacco company. We're taking on big

We're disrupting big tobacco.

The pitch works.

And with a handful of Silicon Valley investors providing $500 ,000 in seed

money, They get to work on their invention.

Right from the start, they operate on a single principle.

It is the burning of the cigarette that kills, not the nicotine.

If they can eliminate the combustion, they believe they can eliminate the

danger. We thought, well, you know, that's easy for us as product designers.

Of course, it turned out to be not so easy. It took thousands of prototypes.

Finally, in 2010, they have a marketable product.

A nicotine vaporizer that heats tobacco rather than burns it. They call it

plume. When you inhale, you get this vapor. But it's not smoke, it's just

So you get the nicotine, you get the flavor, but you don't actually burn the

tobacco.

Marketing professional Kurt Sonderregner, now the owner of his own

business, is hired to sell plume to vape shops.

But it's a tough sell.

It did have a lot of pain points. To start it, you had to push this little

button, and if your finger was in the wrong spot, you could actually get a

little shock.

And there is also an even bigger problem.

The big thing that it wasn't was satisfying.

There was no added nicotine.

If you were a smoker, as I was at the time, you could plume for an hour and

still want to go outside and have a cigarette.

And so Bowen and Montes search for an answer, pouring through tobacco industry

records available online, and they discover a key to their success, a

making nicotine feel less harsh on the throat.

They found that if you brought the pH down to more neutral, even a little bit

acidic pH, the smoke went down way easier.

People could inhale more of it.

More nicotine, that's the answer.

And now they can create their chemical secret sauce, what will allow them to

deliver roughly three times as much nicotine as used in e -cigarettes at the

time. It is, they argue, what smokers need to reject cigarettes.

If an e -cigarette exists and is, in anyone's eyes, inferior as an

experience to cigarettes, then cigarettes remain king.

And it is that powerful punch of the drug that will propel their device into

Silicon Valley's garden.

In Silicon Valley, you often hear about how can you make a product that's

sticky? How can you make a product that you can convince users to come back to

over and over again? But Adam and James had created a product that was

inherently sticky.

Sticky because nicotine is so highly addictive.

If you talk to some adults, they'll say, it was easier for me to get off of

cocaine or heroin than to get off of my cigarettes.

Now, Bowen and Montes face one last step, designing the device.

We wanted this product to look distinctly different from a cigarette

it's stigmatized and it's associated with things that we want to move past as

people.

So they turn to Silicon Valley designers and ask one question.

What would smoking in the future look like?

And one of the individuals, he reaches into his pocket and he happens to have a

flash drive in there, like a little thumb drive. He pulls it out and says,

should look like this.

And there it is.

Bowen and Monty's revolutionary answer to cigarettes.

A slim, rechargeable device that delivers a powerful but smooth dose of

sweetened with tasty flavors.

One reviewer calls it the iPhone of e -cigarettes.

Bowen and Monsies call it Juul. They are convinced smokers will love it because

they do.

The moment that we had initial prototypes, I never touched a cigarette

The more I use Juul, the less desirable a cigarette really is.

At one point, Bowen and Monsies share their ideas with the prominent anti

-tobacco activist Stanton Glantz.

He says he gives them a warning.

I said, I think these products are going to really appeal to kids, and that's

going to be a big problem. And their reaction to that was, well, we just

that's not our intended audience.

We don't think kids should use these things. We're all thinking about adult

smokers. And they just discounted the idea.

Up next, Bowen and Monty's face a critical fork in the road. Which way

turn?

In June 2015, Adam Bowen and James Montes are confident that with their

nicotine delivery device, Juul, they are about to change the world.

I'd say in my wildest dreams, Juul and

products like it will equip cigarette consumption worldwide within the next 20

years.

And while that success could spell big bucks for them, Bone and Munsey's insist

they are not in it only for the money.

We see ourselves as a for -profit public good company, which means that, like

any other business, we care about dollars, we care about sales, but we

more about the public impact, the social impact of what we do.

But questions will arise about their motives, not because of what they say,

but because of what they do.

Right at the start, they face a fork in the road.

They could take Juul to the FDA and get it approved as a smoking cessation

device marketed to smokers only, but they don't choose that path.

Instead, they go to where the big money is, the open market.

And they leap into the world of a historically controversial industry.

More doctors smoke camels than any other cigarette. The cigarette industry, of

course, has this long and very controversial history.

And they essentially are walking into an industry that has

incredible baggage from a public health standpoint, from a legal standpoint.

And there are lessons in that baggage on where big tobacco went seriously wrong.

They marketed to kids.

Winston tastes good like a cigarette. The tobacco

companies understood very early on if they were going to replace the people

were killing, and they spoke about this in very, you know, blunt terms, they

needed to recruit teenagers.

And they do. By 1997, the number of young smokers soared to more than 36 %

high school students.

And the tobacco giants are called before Congress to answer allegations about

marketing to kids.

No, we do not market to children and will not.

But the congressmen don't buy that. The American Medical Association found that

91 % of the children, three through six, could match Joe with a Camel cigarette.

which means, Mr. Johnson, that Joe Camel was as well -known as Mickey Mouse.

In the end, the tobacco companies settled hundreds of lawsuits at a cost

billions of dollars.

And they agreed to the rule, no targeting youth, directly or indirectly.

And so Bowen and Monses, as students of Big Tobacco, have a powerful precedent

that says one thing.

Do everything possible to keep Juul out of the hands of kids.

The politically sophisticated person looking at what happened about the

marketing to kids, they would say, boy, you know, this is a very politically

dangerous thing to do. This could get us into a lot of political trouble. It

could get us into legal trouble. But on the other hand, the companies made a

fortune because they were so successful in marketing to kids.

And so, as Bowen and Monsies consider options for Juul, they face another

critical choice.

To be mindful of the kids, or to go for broke?

At this point, the early investors, who reportedly have now kicked in millions

of dollars, are getting impatient.

It had been essentially...

Five, six years that the investors had been patiently waiting for them to

a product that would catch on. And so Adam and James were under immense

to create a product that was going to succeed.

And to succeed, as alleged in multiple lawsuits, they think they need to

establish what they call cool kid equity by getting Juul into the hands of the

cool kids.

And this is what Juul's launch campaign looks like.

Chock full of people who look like cool kids. This is the kind of thing that

advertising professionals know preferentially recruits adolescents.

Robert Jackler is a Stanford medical doctor who studies the impact of tobacco

advertising.

This is something that the average 15, 16, 17 -year -old says, I want to be

them, self -confident, attractive, fun -loving.

young people.

As Jackler sees it, they simply follow the lead of Big Tobacco.

You know, this is the kind of model that Juul adopted with the same playbook as

Philip Morris International in popularizing marble amongst young

The similarities to Big Tobacco ads are notable.

And while traditional cigarette companies are banned from creating

Juul goes big in Times Square.

Oh, what's in Times Square? The Disney store, the M &M store.

So there was major league exposure to young people.

From the biggest screens, Juul moves to the smallest screens, getting inside

cell phones via Instagram.

The company pays so -called influencers with a big following to showcase the

device, and it strategically links its images with hashtags across the

creating a community of tens of thousands of followers of hashtag Jewel

Jewel Nation.

And suddenly, Jewel becomes a wild testament to the power of viral

Viral marketing means that Not only do you get a lot of people to use it, but

you get those people who are using it to be evangelists for your product,

actually becoming effectively members of your marketing team.

But what about the millions of smokers they want to save?

You know, if they had been marketing Juul to middle -aged smokers, you would

have seen a totally different advertising campaign.

They would have been running them, you know, in the same place that you see the

ads for Pepto -Bismol and erectile dysfunction drugs and diabetes drugs.

But instead, in the summer of 2015, Juul hits the road.

Heading to Hotspot, from Manhattan to L .A., they set up temporary promotional

Juul lounges.

There, they hand out an impressive 41 ,000 free starter kits.

of their addictive drug.

The device is untested for health risks and unregulated.

Everybody in the e -cigarette industry knew that regulations were coming. But

this golden moment of time, there were none.

And so they just barreled into the market.

The company is not even required to put on a nicotine warning label.

When you look at this, you notice there's no warning.

It doesn't say anything about nicotine. This is what you see in the store. So

how do you find out it's nicotine?

You need a really good camera to see this because it is tiny, fine print, 5 %

nicotine by weight.

At the end of the summer, the success of the launch is promoted in a video.

At first, they're thrilled with the momentum that is building on social

media.

But then they look closely.

And they're like, wow, those people look pretty young.

But should they really be surprised by the kids?

Anyone who knows anything about advertising knows that this is how you

to teenagers.

They knew it.

And they did nothing about it.

Up next, how James Muncy spins Jules' skyrocketing success.

All of a sudden, we couldn't keep up.

Years after it launches, Juul is off to a phenomenal Silicon Valley start and

moving fast.

They're very swept up by following the Silicon Valley playbook,

right? By following this kind of path that set out for them to get the next

round of funding, to get bigger, to be more successful.

In 2016, they sell just over 2 million devices, bringing in $60 million in

revenue.

2017, sales explode to $16 million, bringing in $200 million in revenue.

Bone and Monsi say it just took getting the product into a few stores.

Those few stores got the product out into the hands of a good number of

and then they evangelized it.

And then all of a sudden we couldn't keep up.

But what they don't say is that Juul is also popular somewhere else, in high

schools across the country.

In Vancouver, Washington, McCall Mirabella is a freshman in high school.

a straight -A student and a track star.

And that year she is offered a Juul.

The first hit, I got an immediate head high. But the longer I used it, the less

I experienced it. And then I just became reliant on nicotine.

And so then it wasn't the head high. It was like, oh, I really need some

nicotine right now.

And she is far from alone.

Everyone used it. It would be nerds and band kids and athletes and honor

students. It was everybody.

One attraction for kids is that Jewel is stealthy.

Easy to hide.

Jewel products are super discreet. You can put them in your bra, in your shoe,

in your bag, in the waistline of pants.

And on top of that, they don't make you smell.

And so thousands of kids are slipping their jewels into schools where they get

their nicotine hits in bathrooms and even classrooms.

And that is ending up kids in hospitals.

Sharon Levy, director of the Adolescent Addiction Program at Boston Children's

Hospital, is shocked by who is coming in for treatment.

Suddenly we were seeing middle schoolers, and very regularly, kids who

years old, 12 years old, they would say that they would get headaches, that they

would get nauseated, that they would vomit when they would use their Juul.

these are all signs that they're getting a very, very high level of nicotine

into their body.

It feels like taking a huge step back.

For years, organizations have waged a hard -fought battle to keep nicotine

from kids.

Think smoking makes you look cool?

No way.

With tremendous success.

Since 1997, the number of high school students smoking has plummeted, down

36 % to under 11 % in 2015.

Because kids have learned cigarettes are dangerous.

Jayden Alicia Munoz picked up her first Juul when she is 16.

I don't think I would have smoked cigarettes. My grandpa always did, and

developed lung cancer from it, and so I always knew that I would never touch a

cigarette.

But Juuling, as it is called, is not smoking, and kids believe it is

safe.

Erin Hall is in seventh grade when she is handed a Juul.

Juul said that it was better than smoking cigarettes and that it wasn't

like, health -wise, it wasn't as bad as cigarettes.

So I thought, okay, well, at least I'm not doing cigarettes.

And for kids, Juul is the device of choice.

It's not like millions of kids using e -cigarettes generally.

Like, they're all using Juul. That was the thing about it. It was like there's

something different about this product.

What's different?

Juul's secret sauce.

Initially, no other e -cigarette had such a high level of nicotine.

So this is a rule in addiction medicine.

The higher the dose... Of the substance, and the quicker you can get it to the

brain, the more addictive it will be.

And kids are getting hooked fast on nicotine they don't even know is in

I didn't know there was nicotine when I very, very first hit it, but after they

told me, I still didn't know what that meant.

Like, I didn't know what nicotine was and what it did to you.

But she later finds out.

And that's when it started.

The addiction got worse and worse.

I would be going through a pack of pods in four days.

With the nicotine in one Juul pod equivalent to one pack of cigarettes,

if she has a pack -a -day habit of Marlboros.

And for a young person, that is especially dangerous.

Nicotine actually physically changes your brain. It changes your brain as an

adolescent because your brain is still developing.

And the hold nicotine can have is powerful.

I've seen kids drop out of school. I've seen families sell their house and move

to a different town, hoping there'd be less vaping in their new town.

By the end of 2017, there are reportedly plenty of indications at Juul that kids

are big customers.

One is a letter from a Brooklyn store owner that, according to a federal

lawsuit, is sent to the company in April.

He writes,

I don't think I can justify carrying this anymore.

Kids are getting hooked on this thing, little kids like 14 and 15 -year -olds.

But Bowen and Monsi describe the kids' usage as merely an unintended

of their heroic mission. And they repeatedly say one thing.

This is an issue that we don't want. Any underage consumption of our product is

detrimental to our business.

But their actions say something else.

If you look at Jewel's advertising, it speaks for itself.

Later, see what happens when McCall quits Jewel. I'm ten hours in, and it's

hard.

In 2018, after launching Juul, the company is setting up new offices in an

industrial area on the San Francisco waterfront. It is expanding at breakneck

speed. In just four years, it reaches a value of $15 billion.

Amazingly, it is growing faster than Facebook.

We've scaled tremendously in terms of sales and personnel and facilities, you

name it.

But what's really exciting is that we're just getting started.

They're just trying to send this product into the world. They didn't have the

self -awareness to stop for a minute and to say, hey, let's pump the brakes,

because that's not what anybody really inside the company wanted.

From a figure of $200 million in 2017, Juul's revenue in 2018

skyrockets to $1 billion.

And much of that cash is coming from the pockets of kids, their allowances, and

babysitting money.

As teenage use of e -cigarettes explodes.

In September, the National Youth Tobacco Survey reports that 3 .5 million high

school students are using e -cigarettes.

And so, high school students' tobacco usage is now heading back toward the

it was in the 1990s.

And the FDA is cracking down.

The disturbing and accelerating trajectory of use we're seeing in youth

resulting path to addiction must end.

The finger is pointed at Juul, which now holds 75 % of the e -cigarette market.

With nearly 75 % market share, e -cigarette maker Juul has become enemy

one. And Juul points the finger right back at misleading data.

From the data we've seen, The usage of our product by youth is comparable and

fact less than other adult products such as cigarettes and alcohol.

That's unfair targeting.

I think we get a lot of the attention and criticism because we are the biggest

brand, the biggest manufacturer.

And they make it clear they are not responsible.

Their coast -to -coast launch campaign, that it seems was just a mistake.

When we launched Juul, We had a campaign that was arguably too kind of lifestyle

-oriented, too flashy. We received some criticism when we pulled the campaign.

We think it had no impact on sales.

By 2018, Juul has replaced the cool kids with older smokers. And what they want

is not criticism, but credit for their efforts to combat teenage use.

For example, they removed their sweet -flavored pods from retail shelves.

But they keep selling kids' favorite flavors like mango and cream brulee

contending that they check a buyer's age there.

It didn't matter that it was age -gated. Kids know how to get around that. They

use their parents' accounts. They use gift cards that don't have IDs with

Later, Juul announces it is eliminating its presence on social media.

But still, hashtag Jewel posts continue to pile up, actually tripling in the

next year.

Why? Because they had recruited armies and armies of teens to carry their water

for them. So all of these teenagers at that point, the community, if you will,

were members of the Jewel marketing department.

It is all too little, too late.

But the genie was kind of already out of the bottle by then. Jewel is already on

its own.

trajectory. There's no taking it back.

As the crisis of teen juuling spirals out of control, Robert Jackler says he

meets with James Monsies in Juul's offices.

I said, what are you concerned about? And rather than say, I'm worried about

these unfortunate kids who are getting hooked, he said, I'm worried about my

investors.

But so far, investors are all in.

In June 2018, Juul brings in $1 .2 billion in new funding from investors.

And that push to grow, grow, grow says just one thing to Josh Stein.

They may have told themselves and their employees that this was some savior

product, but they were very much aware about the potential impact on young

people and then the real impact.

And they continued to move in the same direction, which was market share,

share, market share, because they wanted to cash out. They wanted to sell out.

And in December 2018, many observers say they do just that.

Altria reportedly closing in on a deal to buy 35 % of Juul Labs.

It is astounding news.

Juul, the company that set out to eliminate cigarettes, sells one -third

business for $12 .8 billion to Altria.

Who is Altria? It's these guys.

The company once known as Philip Morris, makers of Marlboro, the number one teen

starter brand.

Come to where the flavor is.

Come to Marlboro country.

And with that huge lug of money coming from Big Tobacco, Juul reaches an

astounding value of $38 billion.

Jewel had already been on shaky ground, and doing the deal with Altria, really,

they lost any shred of moral high ground that they might have had left.

This was really seen as doing a deal with the devil.

But Bowen and Monsi stick to their story.

They are saving smokers, and aligning with Big Tobacco is the way to do it.

They have a detailed database on roughly 18 million smokers in the U .S.

So these are the very people that we want to try to reach.

But it is also a huge payday for people at Juul. The early investors make off

with billions.

And Bowen and Montes reportedly each personally get around $640 million out

the deal.

And with that money, they achieve the ultimate Silicon Valley status, making

on the Forbes list of billionaires, the richest people in the world.

Later, James Monsees buys a $22 million house on a hill overlooking San

Francisco.

And for some, Bowen and Monsees' newfound wealth is infuriating.

They presented themselves as these tech bros. We're not tobacco.

We're not going after young people. But they were tobacco, and they ended up

going after young people.

And as a result, they made combined billions of dollars.

And it's just not right.

Up next, the crisis no one sees coming.

Young, healthy adults hospitalized with severe respiratory illnesses.

Want more greed?

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Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

We'll be right back.

By 2019, just four years after Juul hits the marketplace, the company is facing

a world of trouble. This morning, Juul under fire again.

It was almost like deja vu. If you had been watching the tobacco industry, if

you're inside the tobacco industry, the same thing was now happening to Juul.

Just like big tobacco, Juul is hit with hundreds of civil lawsuits across the

country. Many are filled by parents and school districts.

Josh Stein is the first of 39 states' attorneys general to sue the company.

They've caused immense harm and damage to American youth, and they can't just

walk away with their money.

But lawsuits are one thing.

Getting called before Congress is another.

In June, James Monsi finds himself exactly where tobacco executives sat

before, in the congressional hearing room.

And just out of curiosity, Mr. Monsi, do you happen to know off the top of your

head how old you need to be to create an Instagram account?

I don't.

13. You have to be 13 years old.

For more than an hour, Monsies is grilled.

His answers are predictable.

I think the real opportunity here is to improve the lives of a billion people

worldwide. But congressmen see Juul's impact differently.

You're nothing but a marketer of a poison, and your target has been young

people. As Monsies takes the heat, miles away, a crisis is unfolding that is the

last thing Juul needs.

In Wisconsin, teenagers are rushed to the hospital.

Their lungs are badly damaged.

Young, healthy adults hospitalized with severe respiratory illnesses. So sick,

they're being put into medically induced comas. The cause?

Vaping. In time, the CDC learns that the primary cause of the mysterious illness

is illegal cannabis vaping products.

But it is a turning point for the future of legitimate companies like Juul.

I think it was a stark signal to the public that vaping may not be as safe

as benign as it had been advertised, right? So that got people's attention.

It certainly gets McCall Mirabella's attention.

Now, up to two pods a day, she decides to quit Juul, cold turkey.

It is surprisingly rough.

There were many nights where I would grab my Juul from my friend and I'd look

it. And I'd be like, oh, I'm going to hit it. I can't do this.

She records her experience.

I don't know why the fuck I'm crying.

And for months, she captures the story of her nicotine withdrawal, the

headaches, mood swings, stomach upsets.

When she is four months nicotine sober, she posts her video on YouTube.

My name is McCall Mirabella, and I am addicted to nicotine. She gets two

views. Day 90, about five days ago, some cravings have came back.

Ironically, her motivation is the same as a smoker trying to quit cigarettes.

The very group Juul is designed to save.

I wanted to live a life where I didn't need to use a nicotine product every

hour. I wanted to be more in control of my body.

And that's what powered me through.

Up next, who wins the mission or the money?

If the rise of Juul is fast, the fall is even faster.

When the FDA bans sweet flavors in e -cigarettes like Juul and store owners

crack down on underage sales,

Juul's market share plummets.

Moving in on Juul's territory are copycats, disposable synthetic nicotine

-cigarettes.

Through a loophole in regulations,

The non -tobacco devices can offer flavors from blueberry jelly to rainbow

sugar. And these are increasingly popular with the more than 2 million

who report using e -cigarettes in 2021.

Many blame Juul for this new enormous market.

Without Juul, I mean, I never would have started. I don't think anyone would

have really started doing it at my school because they were really the

point for vaping.

And those who began vaping with Juul years ago?

Remember that addiction is a chronic relapsing disease, so many of them will

struggling with addiction for the rest of their lives.

And studies show that a percentage of those addicted to Juul will move on to

cigarettes.

And for many, the conclusion seems obvious.

Juul's battle to eliminate cigarettes has backfired.

You know, as a public health person, the way we can reduce smoking in the adult

population is to keep kids from getting started in the first place.

In 2023, Juul's future is uncertain.

Like hundreds of other e -cigarette companies, it is awaiting a decision

the FDA about whether it can continue to sell its product in the United States.

In the meantime, it settles lawsuits across the country.

Paying hundreds of millions of dollars to families and school districts who

claim to be its victims.

Forty million dollars goes to North Carolina.

Juul will be prohibited from influencer advertising, outdoor advertising near

schools.

With each settlement, the company and Bowen & Monsi's admit no wrongdoing.

But still, many hold them responsible.

They lit a fire.

And as it started to get bigger and bigger, they threw gasoline on it, and

stoked it.

And then when the fire company came, they said, we had nothing to do with

We didn't do anything with that. Oh, my God, look, there's a fire.

While Adam Bowen is still listed as a director at Juul, in March of 2020,

Monsey reportedly cuts ties with the company.

He writes a letter saying he wants to spend more time with his family.

Bowen and Monsies did not respond to a request for comment from American Greed.

The irony in the story is that many smokers do say that devices like Juul

them get off cigarettes.

Kurt Sonderreger is someone who replaces smoking with vaping.

I haven't smoked since 2012.

I know I probably would like to get off nicotine at some point, but I feel like

I'm a winner. I got my life back.

I've cycled 20 ,000 miles on my bike since I stopped smoking, and I feel

completely healthy and alive again.

But many agree that, like all addictive products, Juul needed to be handled with

more care, and that where Bowen and Munchies may have gone wrong... is that

lost their dedication to their cause in the profit -driven mindset of Silicon

Valley.

In Silicon Valley, there's no patience.

So Adam and James were under the gun to grow their company fast, to grow it

quickly, to make it scale.

And that's not what this particular product needed. This product didn't need

scale. I mean, in order to become billionaires, they needed it to scale.

it to be...

a contribution to public health. It didn't need to scale.

And some say it all goes back to that fork in the road where they first had to

choose between the mission and the money. Time and again, faced with

that they could have made between going for the money or more measured growth

while protecting young people from becoming nicotine addicted with their

product, they went for the money every time.