Juul Labs CEO Kevin Burns officially resigned on Sep. 25 amid a growing nationwide ban against vaping.
“Working at JUUL Labs has been an honor and I still believe the company’s mission of eliminating combustible cigarettes is vitally important,” Burns said in a press release.
Burns will be replaced by an executive from Altria Group, the maker of Marlboro cigarettes, which owns a 35 percent stake in Juul in December at a cost of $13 billion.
The San Francisco company currently owns about 70 percent of the e-cigarette market in the United States.
The largest e-cigarette maker in the United States will also no longer promote e-cigarettes in print, digital, and TV advertisements. They pledged also not to lobby against a ban on vaping flavors proposed by the Trump administration earlier this month. A top Trump administration official pledged Friday to use all of the government’s regulatory and enforcement power “to stop the epidemic of youth e-cigarette use.”
At the same time, Juul Labs is facing a growing number of state and federal investigations into its marketing and sales practices.
Burns resignation and the other changes come about two weeks after the Trump administration’s ban of flavored e-cigs.
A recent study showed that about 1 in 11 eighth graders vape.
The study states that vaping of nicotine in adolescents has been increasing continually, “The rapid increase in adolescents’ use of electronic cigarettes (known as vaping) during the past decade has aroused public health concern, recently heightened by potential links between vaping and acute lung injury,” reads the statement.
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker banned the sale of all e-cigarette products for four months, reported Fox Business.
“We’re declaring this public health emergency because medical and disease control experts have been tracking the rapidly increasing number of vaping related illnesses that in some cases have led to death,” Baker said at a press conference. “We as a commonwealth need to pause sales in order for our medical experts to collect more information about what is driving these life-threatening vaping-related illnesses.”
Juul and hundreds of smaller e-cigarette companies are fighting for their survival as they face two public health debacles linked to vaping: a mysterious lung illness and rising use of e-cigarettes by teenagers.
Public health officials are investigating hundreds of cases of the breathing ailment but have not yet identified any one product or ingredient. At the same time, underage vaping has reached epidemic levels, according to top government health officials, with more than 1 in 4 high school students using e-cigarettes in the last month.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
