Juul knew teens were hooked to nicotine formula in e-cigarettes

Juul saw early warning signs that its products might be highly addictive, but ultimately let the e-cigarettes go to market without limiting their high dosage of nicotine, according to a Reuters investigation. Former Juul employees told Reuters that the company's tests suggested its e-cigarettes would so potent and addictive they would need to develop a way to limit its nicotine delivery - but ultimately and knowingly let the device that has surged in popularity among US teens go to market with no way to throttle its unprecedentedly high dose of the drug Juul´s founders applied for a patent in 2014 that described methods for alerting the user or disabling the device when the dose of a drug such as nicotine exceeds a certain threshold. The breakthrough 'nicotine salts' formula that made the Juul e-cigarette so addictive - and ignited the company´s explosive market-share growth made Juul especially attractive to teenagers and other new users who otherwise would never have smoked cigarettes, according to interviews with more than a dozen tobacco researchers, pediatricians, and a Reuters review of Juul patents and independent research on nicotine chemistry. But the company´s sales force - tasked with convincing reluctant retailers to give Juul shelf space - emphasized the device´s unique addictive power by showing store owners charts depicting how the Juul device delivers nicotine to the bloodstream as efficiently as a traditional cigarette, said Vincent Latronica, who headed sales and distribution for the company on the US East Coast from 2014 until early 2016. Unlike a cigarette, a Juul delivers 'high doses of nicotine without it hurting the mouth and throat' at the moment when a user inhales, said Ted Wagener, a tobacco researcher at Ohio State University.