Select an option below to continue reading this premium story.
Already a Honolulu Star-Advertiser subscriber? Log in now to continue reading.
Hawaii will get nearly $7 million as its share in the $438.5 million settlement between JUUL Labs and 34 states and territories. Hawaii’s monetary value might not be huge, but the win against the e-cigarette maker’s misleading marketing practices is. A two-year, multistate investigation found that JUUL used sales strategies that targeted teenagers, even though e-cigs are illegal for them to buy, while falsely understating the product’s nicotine content and addictiveness.
The settlement requires JUUL to comply with strict terms severely limiting its e-cig marketing and sales practices. Let’s hope this will help bring down usage among teens in Hawaii, whose middle-schoolers have the highest vaping rate among U.S. states that track such data.