Juul threw millions of dollars at Washington. It hasn’t bought much.
Juul Labs has spent millions of dollars on lobbying, hired high-profile Trump administration officials, and blanketed Washington with ads touting its efforts against underage vaping.
None of that was enough to keep President Donald Trump from moving to ban flavored e-cigarettes on Wednesday, delivering a blow to the dominant vaping company and its rivals.
“vaping has become a very big business as I understand it, a giant business in a very short period of time,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, sitting alongside Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. “But we can't allow people to get sick and we can't have our youth be so affected.”
Neither Trump nor Azar mentioned Juul in their remarks. But Scott Gottlieb, who pressed for greater regulation of vaping as Trump’s Food and Drug Administration commissioner before stepping down earlier this year, said the move would have an outsize impact on the San Francisco-based company.
“This problem was largely created by the cartridge-based Juul products in my opinion,” Gottlieb said in a statement to POLITICO.
None of that was enough to keep President Donald Trump from moving to ban flavored e-cigarettes on Wednesday, delivering a blow to the dominant vaping company and its rivals.
“vaping has become a very big business as I understand it, a giant business in a very short period of time,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, sitting alongside Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. “But we can't allow people to get sick and we can't have our youth be so affected.”
Neither Trump nor Azar mentioned Juul in their remarks. But Scott Gottlieb, who pressed for greater regulation of vaping as Trump’s Food and Drug Administration commissioner before stepping down earlier this year, said the move would have an outsize impact on the San Francisco-based company.
“This problem was largely created by the cartridge-based Juul products in my opinion,” Gottlieb said in a statement to POLITICO.
