Book Review: The Devil's Playbook

Lauren Etter, The Devil's Playbook: Big Tobacco, Juul, and the Addiction of a New Generation. New York: Crown, 2021. ISBN: 9780593237984.

 

Genre: nonfiction

Subgenre: business, crime

Format: hardcover book

Source: Berea branch, Madison County (KY) Public Library

This was a long but interesting book. This is the tale of a small start up company that became the e-cigarette juggernaut known as Juul. It is also the tale of Altria, the big tobacco company, parent company of Marlboro and other brands, that found itself losing customers to Juul and unable to innovate with a competitive alternative. So Altria's CEO's plan? If you can't innovate buy the innovating competitor, and that was his plan: buy Juul at any cost. That is not all. Juul may have started with good intentions, at least according to its founders, but in the end it caused a massive nicotine addiction epidemic. 

The book's story goes from the days after the wars against Big Tobacco. The Master Settlement (you can view the settlement and other related documents here via UCSF, University of California-San Francisco, which made a searchable archive for them) is in place after tobacco companies settled with states the various lawsuits over the health hazards of tobacco. By now, the tobacco companies are abiding by the settlement, putting youth prevention programs in place, and even youth smoking numbers are going down. Things seem pretty tranquil. Into this environment two Silicon Valley guys out of Stanford get an idea: can they create a product to deliver the nicotine fix smokers crave without the harms of burning tobacco? They went on to create what eventually became Juul. Yet in typical Silicon Valley fashion of "move fast and break things" they did more than break a few things. Sure, millionaires were made, but teens died along the way while Juul cared more about coolness, sales, and greed. Keep in mind at the time e-cigarettes were not regulated as other tobacco products are regulated, so Juul started with a huge commercial advantage. By the time the government and regulators got a clue, a lot of teens were harmed for life or dead. By the time Juul fell the damage and destruction were done. The company did move fast, and they broke a lot of lives and families.

This is a lengthy book, but it presents a lot of detail. It does so in a mostly linear narrative. The narrative goes between Juul, Altria, government agencies like the FDA, and later parents forming advocacy groups to oppose Juul and vaping after seeing the damage to their children. I found it interesting that these parents were mostly rich privileged families from Silicon Valley with a lot of money and a lot of connections worried about their kids in their fancy high tuition private schools. We need to be honest here. Had these been poor inner city kids or rural kids dying, the advocacy would likely have been less effective or not happened at all. Money and access to it made a big difference for these parents to form nonprofit groups, pay consultants, lobby politicians, etc. Naturally, the other side had deep pockets as well. I found interesting also how this book illustrates how politics and business work, often hand in hand and on the basis of who has enough money to outlast the other side. Still, when your product is killing young people, or at least allegedly so, a deep wallet and lobbyists many not be as helpful. 

Nowadays we often talk about companies like Facebook and their disregard for the damages to society they cause. Before Facebook's recent revelations (as of this post), Juul was following that same disregard for the damage they were causing. The book presents a story of hubris and Silicon Valley greed and arrogance. They figured, mistakenly so, they could ask forgiveness rather than ask permission. Turns out they got it wrong. Even as tobacco experts warned them, based on experience, the Juul founders and the company plowed on. There was money to be made and a cool reputation to maintain. We get a lesson on the consequences of hubris and why breaking things may not be a good idea. 

We also get a bit of a tragedy for Altria. Unable to innovate in the e-cig market, their own product a flop, CEO Howard Willard becomes obsessed with buying Juul, or at least getting an ownership stake. By the time he did manage to get a minority stake (hoping to get the rest of the pie later), it was already too late. This was a case of an old company trying to "innovate" by buying competitors (see also Disney and its acquisitions in recent years). Except Willard's deals almost ruined Altria (not that I have that much sympathy for them but I digress), cost the company way too much, caused layoffs at Altria, plus it brought them new legal problems. A lesson in greed and obsession. 

The story overall makes for good drama. We get a look at human nature, often at its worst motivated by greed and a selfish disregard for others. We get emotion as we see the stories of young people dying as parents try to figure out how to save them. We get drama from government agencies too slow to act even as some in said government try to do something. It is an engaging story, and the author tells it very well This story reads like a good dramatic film. To be honest, I would not be surprised if some streaming service picks this up for a screen adaptation. It certainly has the ingredients of a good story and dramatic narrative. 

The book includes extensive endnotes for each chapter for documentation. It may be drama, but it is real. The text can be a bit dense, but it manages to keep your interest overall. I really like this one. 

4 out of 5 stars. 

* * * * * 

Additional reading notes: 

 

Bowen and Monsees, future Juule founders, first asked why a cigarette that would not kill people was not made yet. Why had the tobacco companies not done it? Turns out the companies tried and failed. How did Bowen and Monsees know? The had access to the Master Settlement Agreement and its trove of documents, which by then were searchable online (see link above): 

"The archives contained internal emails and handwritten letters, scientific studies and business plans, patents and product research, all of which opened an incredible window into a secretive industry that had spent billions of dollars over nearly half a century trying to develop a new, noncombustible cigarette" (24). 

That is also a nice shout out for universities and their archives and libraries digitizing things for public access. 

Meanwhile, Altria had not really created anything new since 1954 when it created Marlboro: 

"Other than Marlboro, almost every product in the company's portfolio had been purchased, not innovated. That bruising fact, now more than ever, weighed on everybody as cigarette sales continued to slide" (93). 

The basic cigarette company strategy: 

"Grow market share through sales trench warfare, while increasing cigarette prices just enough every year to offset declines and increased taxes, but not enough to spook customers" (93). 

By 2019, things took a dive: 

"Then on August 23, the state of Illinois reported the death of an adult who'd had a vaping-related lung injury. It was the nation's first vaping-related death. That day, the CDC also announced that there were now nearly two hundred cases of potential vaping-related lung injury in twenty-two states. For the first time, there was what seemed like a nationwide panic. Vaping was causing death and sick kids. And unfortunately for Juul, Juuling had become shorthand for vaping" (328).

Tough for Juul, but between their pursuit of cool, aggressive use of social media, appeals to young people they failed to see, willingly at first, as an issue, plus a haphazard operation that did little research, well, this was bound to happen. They dug their own grave at the expense of those lives. 

Juul was a victim of its own reputation, which they created and fostered: 

"The evidence would soon become clearer that while Juuling was commonplace, it was likely bootlegged cannabis products that had been the culprit of the lung injuries. Still, at least wasn't inconceivable that but for Juuling, the boy might never have taken up vaping other substances. Either way, the damage to Juul's reputation had been done-- vaping and Juuling had become synonymous in the eye of the public" (347). 

That is kind of of how googling became a verb associated to doing web searching, except the folks at Juul really pushed it. 

 

By the way, on February 5, 2020, a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee held hearings on "Vaping in America." In the meantime, down the hall was another hearing (probably this one best I can tell) on "the virus [that] had ripped through China but hadn't registered in the United States as a credible threat" (379).

And to be honest, once COVID-19 overtook the United States, this vaping issue mostly fell off the radar like so many issues did.