The JUUL Lawsuit: A Conversation with Attorney General Keith Ellison
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uring the second half of 2019, episodes of severe lung disease and even death from vaping were in the news. In response, Governor Tim Walz announced on December 4 that the State of Minnesota was suing JUUL. To give MetroDoctors readers a deeper understanding, TCMS Immediate Past President Thomas E. Kottke, MD interviewed Attorney General Keith Ellison on January 17, 2020. The transcript, edited for clarity and length, follows:
TEK: Why did you run for Attorney General?
TEK: I’d like to start with finding out about the Attorney General as a person. Where are your roots?
TEK: When did you start thinking about suing JUUL?
AG Ellison: I was born and raised in Detroit. I’m the third son out of five, no sisters. My dad is from Burke County, Georgia, and my mother is from Natchitoches, Louisiana. My mother graduated from Xavier University in New Orleans, and after getting a degree in pharmacy, my father went to the University of Michigan Medical School. He trained to be a psychiatrist back in the fifties when they didn’t even let black students live on campus. My brother is an internist in the city of Detroit. I moved to Minnesota about the age of 22 to go to law school at the University of Minnesota and have been here ever since. TEK: What led you to serve in Congress? AG Ellison: The reason I ran for Congress is because I felt that, as a lawyer, I could only handle one case at a time, but in Congress I could help millions of people at one time by passing laws like the Affordable Care Act. 6
March/April 2020
AG Ellison: The seat opened up so I jumped into it because I thought that we can do stuff about vaping, and we can do stuff about health care, and we can do stuff about telecom, and consumer justice, and wages, and we can deal with the social determinants of health like housing and education. So, I jumped into it, and I’ve been doing it for a year. I love it.
AG Ellison: I thought about a lawsuit when I started seeing a lot of junior high school kids vaping, and when I read about the pods containing a lot of nicotine, and I started to understand how addictive nicotine can be and how debilitating getting an addiction as a preteen or teenager can be to life as an adult. Elijah Cummings, before he passed away, was conducting some hearings on JUUL and vaping and the deceptive practices that they were engaged in. So, I decided that the Attorney General’s Office would do something about JUUL. We filed a lawsuit that is primarily targeted at the deceptive trade practices related to young people. While we think JUUL has to tell the truth to adults, too, their advertising to young people is particularly bad; it creates a very serious health risk to our society. So, we decided to take them on. If JUUL wants to market an inherently hazardous substance to adults, they need to tell the truth about the risk they’re running, and then adults can make their
Thomas E. Kottke, MD and Attorney General Keith Ellison.
own decisions. But if you are lying to kids, we’re going to sue you. TEK: Was there a particular trigger for the lawsuit? AG Ellison: The stories in the paper about people dying piqued my interest. When I dug into it, I became convinced that we needed to sue. And, I’ll tell you quite frankly, a very good friend of mine called me one day and told me that they were working for JUUL. And this good friend of mine told me that JUUL was “harm reduction” and that it was going to be a good thing for adults because it’s less hazardous than combustible cigarettes. I just thought to myself, “if these guys are hiring people with real bona fides in the civil rights area to convince me about how wonderful they are, they must really be desperate.” So, it had the opposite effect, right? They wanted to get me to think, “This is my buddy, I can be happy with what they’re doing.”
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