Barrage of anecdotes ahead, in the absence of good data. I also have a pretty big interest in the company, despite not vaping. I have a small write up on design

Barrage of anecdotes ahead, in the absence of good data. I also have a pretty big interest in the company, despite not vaping. I have a small write up on designing my own Juul pods (delving into the chemistry) on my site https://ethanmye.rs/fixed/projects/juulpods/ https://ethanmye.rs/fixed/projects/juulpods/ I am a college student (probably Juul's main target audience) in the US. Juuling in unbelievably popular, for a couple of big reasons. It's discrete -- no visible vapor, smell is noticeable, but not an obscene scent. Widely available - pods can be bought anywhere, pawned off friends, etc Crazy addictive -- there's someone else here talking about research into MAOI prompting nicotine, but it's important to note nicotine is available in two forms -- as a freebase, and as a salt. Previously, vapes were limited in concentration of freebase nicotine to a few mg/ml of nicotine, owing to the harshness of anything higher. Juul turned freebase nicotine into a salt, allowing them to push the concentration waaaaaaaaaay higher. IIRC, it's something like 60mg/ml. They use benzoic acid, but also have patents on basically every acid you could think of, even choices that would be terrible for you, like sulfuric acid. The patent info is a wealth of interesting tidbits -- vaping a salt pushes nicotine into the bloodstream way faster than basically any other method except IV. Excellent marketing. They say they don't market to kids, but let's be honest -- that ad spend is getting in front of kids well under 18, and they know it. All the need is the plausible deniability to say they didn't target 18 years, and they're good. I should also point out these guys are making money hand over fist. They're selling, for $4, a pod with 700uL of liquid in it -- this works out to about $15,000 a gallon, for maybe $10 in ingredients, $20 if they switch to synthetic nicotine, which would let them push concentrations even higher. It's a printer and ink model, except the printer is probably the most addictive chemical we know of, other than maybe meth. I should mention that while I greatly respect Juul's business savy, I have nothing but disdain for them otherwise. They could EASILY create a program to taper smokers off cigarettes or their own product. There's a fucking microcontroller in the Juul, just reduce the total dose by say, 2% a day and sell pods with decreasing nicotine concentration until people are free of nicotine. Regardless of what they say in front of congressional panels, their marketing IS reaching large number of kids, something that is just too convenient. Their pod design also sucks. Not refillable, complicated, and leaky. Offer a program to buy back old pods (or a discount on a new purchase), or design a new pods.