Big Vape

'Big Vape is a dazzling story that crackles with the energy of a nicotine buzz, mixing tales of ground-breaking innovation with those of corporate greed and government dysfunction' Christopher Leonard, author of the New York Times bestseller, Kochland

It began with a smoke break.
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THIS IS A STORY OF AMBITION AND GREED

James Monsees and Adam Bowen were two ambitious graduate students at Stanford, and in between puffs after class they dreamed of a way to quit smoking. Their solution became the Juul, a sleek, modern device that could vaporize nicotine into a conveniently potent dose.

THIS IS A STORY OF BOOM AND BUST

The business they built around that device, Juul Labs, would go on to become a $38 billion company and draw blame for addicting a whole new generation of underage tobacco users.

THIS IS A STORY OF OUR TIME

With rigorous reporting and piercing insight into a Silicon Valley startup, Big Vape uses the dramatic rise of Juul to tell a larger story of big business, Big Tobacco, and the high cost of a product that was too good to be true.
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A propulsive, eye-opening work of reporting, chronicling the rise of Juul and the birth of a new addiction

'The rise and fall of Juul is an instructive tale and Jamie Ducharme does an excellent job detailing how one bad decision after another led the company astray in this deft rendition of grand start-up dreams gone up in smoke.' Reeves Wiedeman, author of Billion Dollar Loser

'Big Vape is more than just brilliantly reported and elegantly written. It is also a richly populated book - filled not just with human characters but with matters of science, finance, invention, ambition, ethics, hubris, and blazing ingenuity.' Jeffrey Kluger, bestselling co-author of Apollo 13