THE DEVIL'S PLAYBOOK

Big Tobacco meets Silicon Valley in this corporate exposé of what happened when two of the most notorious industries collided--and the vaping epidemic was born.

Since its founding in 2015, Juul has exploded into the highest-selling e-cigarette on the market. It made its founders billionaires and wormed its way into the zeitgeist -and has also become the face of the youth vaping crisis. In 2018, the Surgeon General declared the staggering rise of e-cigarette use among teens an epidemic: data that year showed that more than 3.6 million teens, including 1 in 5 high school students and 1 and 20 middle school students, used e-cigarettes. The following year, a series of deaths and severe lung injuries tied to vaping sounded even more alarm bells; and while we are now more aware of its threat, the vaping epidemic still rages. In THE DEVIL'S PLAYBOOK: Big Tobacco, Juul, and the Addiction of a New Generation, award-winning Bloomberg journalist Lauren Etter reveals the riveting story of the business's unprecedented boom and the staggering damage it caused - a story inextricably linked to Big Tobacco.

In this deeply researched investigation, Lauren Etter tells the inside story of Juul: from its idealistic infancy in a Stanford design school lab - where graduate students Adam Bowen and James Monsees dreamed of a device that could give smokers a less harmful and less socially alienating way to get their fix - to its meteoric rise fueled by Silicon Valley venture capital and an innovation-at-all-costs ethos; and throughout it all, its love-hate relationship with the traditional tobacco industry. Bowen and Monsees envisioned a new smoking device that would save lives and destroy Big Tobacco, but they ended up baking the industry's DNA into their invention's science and marketing. Ultimately, Juul's e-cigarette was so effective and so market-dominating that it put the company on a collision course with Altria (née Philip Morris) and sparked one of the most explosive public health crises in recent memory.

To fully understand Juul, Etter dives deep into the riveting history of the American tobacco industry and the anti-smoking movement. Over decades, Philip Morris and other major tobacco companies spent billions on research and development that led to fascinating science but few successful products. Instead, the industry's infamous lies about the health impacts of smoking and deceptive marketing tactics led to an enormous public health crisis, revealed and curtailed by the success of the anti-smoking movement and government regulation throughout the 1990s. By the time Juul took off, Big Tobacco was obsessed with the e-cigarette as its savior: a product with all the addictive upside of the original without the same apparent health risks and bad press. Philip Morris's struggle to innovate left them desperate to acquire Juul, even as their own executives - still shell-shocked from the Tobacco Wars of the 90s - sounded alarms about the startup's reliance on underage customers. And in one of the biggest botched deals in business history, Juul's executives negotiated a lavish deal that let them pocket the lion's share of Philip Morris's $12.8 billion investment while government regulators and furious parents mounted a campaign to hold the company's feet to the fire.

The Devil's Playbook is the inside story of how Juul's embodiment of Silicon Valley's "move fast and break things" ethos wrought havoc on American health, and how a beleaguered tobacco company was seduced by the promise of a new generation of addicted customers. With both companies' eyes on the financial prize, neither anticipated the sudden outbreak of vaping-linked deaths that would terrorize a nation, crater Juul's value, end Willard's career, and show the costs in human life of the rush to richeswhile Juul's founders, investors, and employees walked away with a windfall.

Lauren Etter is an award-winning investigative reporter at Bloomberg News, where she writes in-depth corporate features and investigative stories forBloomberg Businessweek. Previously she was a staff reporter at The Wall Street Journal, and she has written for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. She holds master's degrees in journalism and in law from Northwestern University. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and three children.