Juul Labs CEO Kevin Burns has apologized to parents of teenagers for the vaping epidemic in the nation’s high schools, CNBC reported on Sunday.
“I’m sorry that their child’s using the product,” Burns told “Vaporized: America’s E-cigarette Addiction,” a CNBC documentary that premiers Monday.
“It’s not intended for them. I hope there was nothing that we did that made it appealing to them,” he added in a video CNBC shared ahead of the documentary’s release. “As a parent of a 16-year-old, I’m sorry for them, and I have empathy for them, in terms of what the challenges they’re going through.”
Since launching in 2015, Juul has dominated the e-cigarette industry with some 40 percent of the market.
Although the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention has declared that E-cigarettes can contain cancer-causing chemicals, Burns said that vaping’s effect on Juul users is not definitively known, saying “We have not done the long-term, longitudinal clinical testing that we need to do.”
Last December, Surgeon General Jerome Adams issued an advisory calling vaping among American teenagers “an epidemic.”
Juul Labs pulled popular, sweet flavors from shelves last year in an attempt to decrease teenage vaping and bought several full-page ads warning about the risks, according to The Hill.
But critics who say Juul helped fuel interest among teenagers in their product have pointed to the company’s first ads, which featured bright colors and young models.
Juul Co-founder Adam Bowen told CNBC the ads were inapproproiate but downplayed their influence.
“When we launched Juul, we had a campaign that was arguably too kind of lifestyle-oriented, too flashy,” he said. “It lasted less than six months... We think it had no impact on sales.”
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