October 2, 2019

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Business October 2, 2019

As Pressure From Regulators Increases, Juul Shifts Its Strategy

The vaping company Juul is under intense pressure from regulators and politicians. It’s spending more on lobbying, public relations and grassroots campaigns to stir up opposition to new vaping laws.



MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

The vaping company Juul Labs finds itself under siege by politicians, regulators and doctors. It’s happening amid reports that a dozen people have died after using vaping products, and hundreds of others have become ill from products related to vaping. As efforts to regulate the industry have increased, Juul has poured millions of dollars into lobbying and public relations campaigns. NPR’s Jim Zarroli has this report.

JIM ZARROLI, BYLINE: Juul was founded four years ago, promising it could help smokers quit. And it quickly became a vaping powerhouse. At first, the company faced hardly any regulation, and it had to spend very little money on lobbying – just $120,000 in 2017. But as efforts to regulate vaping have intensified, Juul has ramped up its lobbying. Sheila Krumholz of the Center for Responsive Politics says the company spent nearly $2 million in the first six months of this year alone.

SHEILA KRUMHOLZ: As a new company, it’s striking how much they’re spending in just a very short period of time.

ZARROLI: Among tobacco companies, only Philip Morris and Altria spend more on lobbying. Meredith McGehee, executive director of the campaign finance reform group Issue One, says the money helps Juul get in the door to speak to regulators and lawmakers.

MEREDITH MCGEHEE: They’re out there trying to convince people that Juul is a good alternative to smoking, and they want to be able to go in, get in front of policymakers and make that case.

ZARROLI: And that’s just what Juul spends at the federal level. As the tobacco executives who now run Juul know all too well, many anti-tobacco laws have originated in cities and states, and Juul has hired dozens of lobbyists in statehouses and city halls across the country. Denise Roth Barber directs the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

DENISE ROTH BARBER: They spend copious amounts of money lobbying the lawmakers who get elected. And that’s where the rubber really hits the road, and they are swarming the capitals in a way that regular citizens are not.

ZARROLI: And this doesn’t include expenditures the company doesn’t have to disclose, like the money paid to public relations firms or to independent groups that may support its agenda. For example, Juul’s website contains links to the Switch network. It helps members of the public find a pro-vaping rally to attend or write a letter to their members of Congress. Stanford’s Robert Jackler researches the impact of tobacco advertising.

ROBERT JACKLER: It sounds as though it’s an upswelling of the population, but it’s actually driven by the company to simulate it, make it look like it’s something that came from the grassroots amongst the voters.

ZARROLI: But it’s not clear how well any of this will work. Although it’s not known what exactly is causing the lung illnesses, Jackler says concerns about vaping are growing.

JACKLER: This recent rash of acute and very serious and sometimes lethal e-cigarette-related illnesses in the lung have very much focused and changed the national dialogue.

ZARROLI: As criticism has mounted, Juul has agreed to stop advertising in the United States and has fired its CEO. It’s also promised not to lobby against a proposed Trump administration ban on flavored vaping products. But the company is still hoping to push back against other proposed anti-vaping regulations, and that seems to be getting harder to do as time goes on.

Jim Zarroli, NPR News, New York.

(SOUNDBITE OF ANNIE’S “ANTHONIO”)

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Health October 2, 2019

‘Los Angeles Times’ Investigation Shows How Vaping Crisis Could Have Been Prevented

NPR’s Michel Martin speaks with Los Angeles Times reporter Emily Baumgaertner about how the FDA tried banning vaping flavors, but the Obama administration rejected it.



MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Every day now, it seems we hear doctors warning about vaping, particularly among young people, and governments weighing bans on vape products. A Los Angeles Times investigation now makes clear this crisis could have been prevented.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned back in 2015 that e-cigarettes with flavors like cherry and cotton candy were particularly attractive to children and could be dangerous in and of themselves. The agency drafted a rule that included a ban on flavored products and then sent it off to the White House for approval.

LA Times reporter Emily Baumgaertner explains what happened next.

EMILY BAUMGAERTNER: The draft went into the White House including a flavor ban, and it came out without that flavor ban. It also came out without 15 pages of evidence that detailed exactly why those flavors were so dangerous for children.

MARTIN: And what did your reporting indicate about – do we know what happened there?

BAUMGAERTNER: We learned that more than a hundred lobbyists and advocates came to the White House in about a 45-day span. What’s interesting here is that you see some of the representation coming from vaping companies, vaping groups, even small businesses, but you also see big tobacco companies arriving.

So you have companies like Altria, a tobacco giant, that sent four representatives right in the middle of this decision-making process. Altria, several years later, went on to buy a 35% stake in the company Juul, which was the most popular e-cigarette among teens. So you certainly see representation from the tobacco companies showing up at the Office of Management and Budget during this time frame.

MARTIN: Can I just clarify that, ’cause I think many people might find it curious that the tobacco companies were involved here because I think a lot of people have the impression that e-cigarettes are an alternative to tobacco products? I mean, the whole point was to get people to stop using tobacco products. That’s not true?

BAUMGAERTNER: Very interesting point that you make. And that’s a question that many federal officials are trying to get to the bottom of right now. Even in Congress, Senator Durbin is on top of this issue. You’ve seen companies like Juul arguing that they are an alternative to tobacco, that they’re even a safe alternative to tobacco. But, of course, giant tobacco companies have a large stake in the company. So a lot of people are wondering the same thing you’re wondering – how can that be?

MARTIN: So when you approached former Obama administration officials to ask them what happened there, what did they say?

BAUMGAERTNER: The argument on behalf of the Office of Management and Budget, which is essentially the economists in the White House, is this was going to have a very, very, very large effect on small businesses around the country. And they felt that the science wasn’t yet strong enough to make such an economic burden on those companies.

It’s important to note that the Office of Management and Budget often serves as a bottleneck for regulations, no matter the political party. Often, once the Office of Management and Budget touches a regulation, it tends to weaken.

MARTIN: And, well, you say in your piece that after these rules took effect in 2016, sales for Juul, the most popular e-cigarettes, skyrocketed by more than sixfold. And you say this reversed decades of progress on youth smoking and that by 2018, about 4.9 million middle and high school students were using tobacco products. This, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; you quote them in your piece.

Now the FDA is finalizing a policy to essentially ban flavored e-cigarettes. What lesson do you think we should draw from all this?

BAUMGAERTNER: You know, a lot of folks think that it’s good news that the FDA is finally making moves on this, but other groups say they’ll believe it when they see it. There’s a chance that the regulation could not go through fully.

And in the long term, what’s more important to notice here is that these acute infections that have people anxious about vaping are a very small piece of the problem. A much bigger part of the problem will be the long-term effects, the millions of teens who could switch to cigarettes, meaning hundreds of thousands more could die as a result of smoking in the long run.

MARTIN: That is Emily Baumgaertner. She’s a reporter for the LA Times.

Emily, thanks so much for joining us.

BAUMGAERTNER: Thank you.

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Sports October 2, 2019

Are The Miami Dolphins Losing In Order To Get A Better Draft Pick?

The NFL’s Miami Dolphins have lost their first four games by staggering margins. Sports commentator Mike Pesca speculates on why the team is losing.



DAVID GREENE, HOST:

I guarantee it. This is one week on the NFL schedule where the Miami Dolphins will not lose. That’s only because they’re not playing. The Dolphins have lost their first four games – not just lost but lost badly by staggering margins. Not exactly a fun time to be a Dolphins fan, but commentator Mike Pesca says this is actually part of a strategy.

MIKE PESCA: The Miami Dolphins are what football experts call terrible. In fact, they are historically awful. The team is winless. They’ve been outscored 81-0 in the second halves of games. They have scored 26 points this entire season but given up 40 points per game, meaning the average Dolphins score this year has been a loss by a tally of 41-6. The dolphins are no strangers to the tank. A player named Tank Carradine was signed then released two times by the Dolphins this year. Also for the first three years of their existence, the Dolphins had a live mascot swimming in a tank in their stadium. But those aren’t the tanks that we’re talking about. In the Dolphins’ case, tanking means trying to lose in order to get a better draft spot, which are awarded by inverse order of finish. And the Fins were finished before the season started.

Tanking is a viable strategy throughout sports. The Houston Astros won a World Series thanks to tanking. The Philadelphia 76ers are regarded by Las Vegas as the fourth most likely team to win a championship largely thanks to tanking. Baseball, this season, offered more tanking than the 3rd Armored Division in the Battle of the Bulge. A record-setting four teams lost more than 100 games, which doesn’t just happen. Tanking is intentional, which is why it is seen as a shameful act to be publicly disavowed despite plenty of evidence that it’s sound strategy.

But in football, tanking is different. The physicality of the sport renders it dangerous. There is no whimsy in a play poorly defended. There is peril. When an outfielder misses the cutoff man, it’s an error. If a lineman misses a blocking assignment, it’s a health risk. Football, when played by compensated professionals, is just this side of the knife’s edge between rough and wanton.

Plenty of former fans have turned away because of the inherent risks and inevitable maimings. It’s not as if the individual players on a tanking team aren’t trying. It’s just that management strategy is to field a team with little regard to player quality. It is a chain assembled from the weakest links around, and that’s a chain that will break.

We’ve never seen an NFL team that is tanking as badly as the Dolphins. Their strategy isn’t just poor sportsmanship. The Dolphins’ experiment is, in a word, dangerous; in two words, borderline immoral. If a Dolphins player were to be seriously hurt in the pursuit of an exploitable quirk in the draft rules, that injury will be on the conscience of everyone in management in the league office who did nothing to forestall a season of purposeful losses.

Of course, there still may be some joy in Miami. ESPN has a statistical model that predicts the team will finish with not one but two wins. And one could come at the expense of the Washington Redskins, who are also winless and travel to Miami in a week. The Redskins are a terrible team, too, with quarterback questions and a porous defense. Their ineptitude, however, is come by honestly. They’re trying to win. They just can’t. You may wonder which model of failure is worse. But the answer is clear. The football the Redskins are playing is wretched. The kind of football the Dolphins are playing is wrong.

(SOUNDBITE OF TERRACE MARTIN’S “NEVA HAFTA WURRY BOUT DAT”)

GREENE: Commentator Mike Pesca. He hosts the Slate podcast “The Gist.”

(SOUNDBITE OF TERRACE MARTIN’S “NEVA HAFTA WURRY BOUT DAT”)

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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