this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2026
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Privacy
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Not saying it's right, but only appropriate things can be advertised to children, so in the UK that's no junk food for example - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/mar/10/uk-junk-food-ad-ban-so-diluted-it-may-be-largely-ineffective-experts-say
When was the last time any company got prosecuted for violating that? And was the fine less than the profit they made by violating the law?
In the US, the govt allows cigarettes to be advertised to children.
The US doesn’t allow cigarettes to be advertised to children or anywhere where they might see it. This was a Clinton administration thing. That’s why the Winston Cup became the Nextel Cup in NASCAR as just one for instance.
And so JUUL, which is made from all the main ingredients of a cigarette, is not a cigarette? And it’s not advertised heavily on social media like Snapchat, where most youth are? Instead of the fucking nascar?
Unfortunately we live in a time when if the law doesn’t specifically call out something then it doesn’t apply. So no, as far as US law is concerned, Juuls are not cigarettes just like Uber isn’t a taxi service and YouTube isn’t a broadcaster.
But we as common sense people can say that Juul is a cigarette and the govt hasn’t done enough to kill its advertising to children.
Yes and no. Juuls and the like contain nicotine salts that degrade the heating element. There is mounting evidence to suggest that these will need their own awareness campaign as they have very different health risks to original tobacco use. However, there are other kinds of vape pens that don’t contain nicotine salts or that use solids instead of liquids that have already been grouped in with Juuls in legislation. Simply applying common sense is often not enough to cover the whole situation which is why industries like this rely on legislation being too slow to stop them.
Oh, I'm not saying that the law should be "common sense". Often that has been used to cover all kinds of nonsense. But the fact that the product exists and is one more loophole away from again full scale advertising to children (as opposed to the shadow "influencer" advertising that they're doing right now) is the problem.
I think you make a fair point here, partially. However, Marlboro could also advertise on snapchat if they wanted. Now there's no doubt something like that would catch massive eyes, landing them in hot enough water to probably change the law around it. If Marlboro leadership saw Juul as a threat, that would make sense to do. They lose a pittance in advertising and court fees, and cut off a competitor from an advertising stream.
But they're not a threat, they're an asset. Altria, the parent company of Philip Morris and NJOY, has a 35% stake in Juul. Altria is incentivized to keep their piles of shit separate.
Vaping has the potential to be healthier than cigarettes, socially and physically. But not when it's almost entirely controlled by companies that have a history of marketing to children. It's physically healthier sure, but only 107 countries have laws regulating the age for vaping, vs 188 for cigarettes. The e-waste factor is also huge, something that a lot of people who vape choose to ignore and I wish they couldn't. I vape myself, have for years, and it's a shit state of affairs with how popular disposables are. But I don't know what the realistic solution is. People are going to use tobacco products in a dystopia.
What? Tobacco is like, the one thing that actually has extremely stringent advertising regulations in the US. When vaping products like Juul came around, they were able to exploit loopholes in those laws, but I think those have pretty much been patched up by now.
What, dear friend, are the ingredients of Juul?
Didn't they close up the loopholes in advertising regulations that Juul exploited?
Sure, they did. But that just means some ad-exec and lawyers are working to figure out the next loophole.
I feel like that's pretty meaningfully different from the original claim that the US government allows cigarettes to be advertised to children.