MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota — Monday morning, jury selection begins in the state of Minnesota's case against e-cigarette manufacturer Juul and the tobacco company Altria.
The state is alleging Juul and Altria of, among other things, "deceptive marketing targeting youth."
The trial comes more than three years after Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison first filed a lawsuit against Juul.
"We will prove how Juul and Altria deceived and hooked a generation of Minnesota youth on their products, causing both great harm to the public and great expense to the State to remediate that harm," said Ellison, in a press release.
Minnesota is the first case to go to trial against Juul since more than a dozen states sued the company beginning in 2019.
"It's a pretty significant case," said David Schultz, a law professor at the University of Minnesota. "The case comes down to two or three basic issues. First, it's about the claim that Juul marketed to minors. Second, it did nothing in terms of trying to prevent minors from accessing their product. And third, it was about the fact that they did not make appropriate disclosures regarding the health and safety risks surrounding the use of vaping and some of these smokeless tobaccos."
The state believes Juul, enabled by Altria, "engaged in consumer fraud, negligence, and created a public nuisance."
This isn't new territory for the state. Minnesota was the first state in the country to successfully sue the tobacco industry and win.
In 1998, Minnesota won a landmark settlement against the tobacco companies for, among other things, marketing cigarettes to teenagers and kids. Now the state is taking on vaping.
“Just as this duty led Attorney General Skip Humphrey to take on Big Tobacco three decades ago, it compelled me take on the next generation of misleading and youth-oriented sales tactics," Ellison said, in a statement.
"We know that for a while there was a downtick of the use but when Juul came on market, the use among minors went up dramatically," Schultz said.
The Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found in its 2022 National Youth Tobacco Survey that about 1 in 10 or more than 2.5 million middle and high school students in the U.S. used e-cigarettes. Nearly 85% used flavored e-cigarettes.
Juul and Altria have denied the allegations. In court documents from November 2022, the defendants said, "Minnesota has reaped billions of dollars from tobacco settlements and taxes over the last decade for the purpose of preventing tobacco use and remedying its harms. Yet even after determining that there was an alleged youth vaping problem among Minnesota youth, time and again the State chose to ignore recommended tobacco prevention funding guidelines and instead used these funds to bankroll unrelated projects—like the Minnesota Vikings football stadium."
On Monday, a spokesperson for Juul released the following statement:
Juul Labs has reached settlements with 39 other states and territories, resolving issues from the past while providing hundreds of millions of dollars to further combat underage use and develop cessation programs in those states. We have and continue to seek a similar settlement with the state of Minnesota. Unfortunately, the Minnesota Attorney General’s office is determined to go to trial led by an outside law firm, incurring significant costs to the taxpayers and judicial system. At trial we will present a vigorous defense and show that the state’s claims do not stand up as matters of facts and law.
Effective interventions to address underage use of all tobacco products in Minnesota, including vapor, depends not on headline-driven trials, but on evidence-based policies, programs, and enforcement. This is the approach that Juul Labs supports and has been part of implementing — leading to more than a 50% decline in underage use of vapor products generally and a 95% decline in use of JUUL products from 2019 to 2022 based on the National Youth Tobacco Survey.
If the state wins its case, Schultz said, "It could very well mean a big dent in their [Juul, Altria] pocketbook which is what the state wants to do. Second, it's to get them to compensate the state which means help the state pay for the costs of people having become addicted, having developed several different types of illnesses, perhaps cancers, as a result of it."
If the state loses, Schultz said it could embolden companies marketing to youth for vaping and beyond.
"I think this case has implications not just looking backward with Juul but going forward tobacco, recreational use of marijuana, THC products, perhaps a whole bunch of other things," Schultz said.
Jury selection begins Monday in Hennepin County District Court.
The trial is expected to conclude by April 14.
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