Culture Over Capitalism
Originally published in Weed World Magazine issue 167
I recently sat down to watch the Netflix documentary ’Big Vape: The Rise and Fall of JUUL’ and it got me thinking about the future of cannabis culture under capitalism. Don’t worry if you haven't seen the docuseries there won’t be too many spoilers.
The series focuses on the San Francisco start-up Ploom Inc.’ and their eventual creation of the ultra-popular, single-use cart, nicotine e-cigarette/vaporiser, JUUL. The narrative presented in the documentary states that the company was initially founded in 2007 by two Stanford University graduates, Adam Bowen and James Monsees, with the expressed goal of creating a ‘safer/healthier’ way for existing tobacco smokers to continue to consume nicotine.
After graduating, the two entrepreneurs incorporated and set about developing a portable battery-powered vaporiser that would heat but not combust traditional tobacco. Using their senior year university thesis as the basis for their new product and several years of R&D later, the company had its first major success with the release of the PAX in 2012.
Given the favourable position and popularity that it enjoys in the cannabis industry today, it's difficult to imagine PAX as anything other than a cannabis vaporiser. So I think it's likely that some of you won't know that PAX was initially created to consume traditional rolling/loose-leaf tobacco.
However, it didn’t take long for crafty cannabis consumers to figure out that they could use the PAX to consume cannabis flowers as well, much to the chagrin of Japanese Tobacco International (JTI), the then, world’s third-largest tobacco company and one of Ploom’s main investors at the time. The fear of guilt by association with the emerging cannabis industry proved too much for JTI, which would ultimately pull its investment through a buyback in February 2015.
The parting ways of the two companies resulted in JTI acquiring the patents for ‘Ploom’, adding to their growing e-cigarette portfolio, following its then-recent acquisition of popular UK-based e-cigarette brand ‘E-Lites’.
The loss of the ‘Ploom’ patents and likely the naming rights to JTI resulted in ‘Ploom Inc’ having to change its name. The company, now trading as ‘PAX Labs Inc’ would go on to release the PAX 2 ‘herbal vaporizer’ in March 2015 and the PAX 3 in late 2016 to growing fanfare from cannabis consumers.
The same year ‘PAX Labs’ would release ‘JUUL’, a single-use nicotine cartridge-fed vaporizer available in a variety of different flavours. Traditional E-cigarettes and nicotine vaporizers were initially designed and marketed to help individuals cease smoking and ultimately stop consuming the highly habit-forming drug.
The JUUL, on the other hand, was supposedly created to allow existing tobacco consumers who don’t want to quit a relatively ‘healthier and safer’ nicotine product than traditional combustible tobacco products. The JUUL atomises nicotine salts derived from tobacco to deliver much more of the drug per hit - effectively doubling the maximum potential potency of other comparable products available on the market.
Sales of JUUL were slow at first, but thanks to an ‘Apple-esque’ viral marketing ad campaign (think mid-2000s IPod commercials), complete with bright bold colours and young ‘cool’ people using and sharing their product, sales began to skyrocket - especially amongst the youth. By 2017, the sales of JUUL surpassed all other e-cigarettes/vapes in the US and came to dominate over 70% of the total market share by late 2018.
The success of the ‘iPhone of E-cigarettes’ meant that the company urgently needed to scale up the business to meet the demand it had created in the market. The decision would therefore be made in June 2017 to spin off PAX into an independent company (PAX Labs Inc) to allow the newly renamed ‘JUUL Labs Inc’ to continue to focus on its increasingly popular USB-charged nicotine cart delivery system.
A perfect storm of appealing to fashion-conscious young people, innovative/disruptive technology, viral marketing, and the perception that e-cigarettes are effectively harmless compared to smoking cigarettes led to the US Surgeon General proclaiming in 2018, an “epidemic of youth e-cigarette use”. Responding to growing concerns from parents, physicians, and the FDA, JUUL pulled some of its flavours from sale.
Despite the backlash the unprecedented growth of JUUL still garnered a lot of attention from ‘old money’ particularly Marlboro cigarette manufacturer and the world’s second-largest tobacco company, Altria. The US tobacco Giant would ultimately acquire a 35% stake in the company in December 2018 – effectively taking over the company.
The documentary does a great job at presenting the thoughts and feelings of the employees who joined the company believing in the founder's expressed mission statement and their sense of utter betrayal at so easily being bought out by ‘the enemy’.
The series captures the ironic and somewhat inevitable evolution of the start-up with its stated intention to ‘end cigarette smoking’ and ‘take on big tobacco’ to a multi-billion dollar world-leading purveyor of nicotine products - now owned by the same industry it set out to disrupt and destroy.
The creation of JUUL and the implementation of its viral marketing strategy was arguably the turning point for the company, as once it had created an equally or more habit-forming way to consume nicotine, the business went from being a potentially disruptive alternative to ’big tobacco’ to being the industry's biggest innovation and cash injection in decades.
It is my opinion that the vested interests of neo-liberalism and shareholder capitalism quickly corrupted and eroded the founder's original vision for the company, over time transforming it from one focused on reducing the number of cigarette smokers in the world to one inevitably financially motivated to increase the total number of nicotine vaporizer users in the world.
While it is fair to say that JUUL and other nicotine vapes have helped some traditional tobacco smokers cut down or even quit their nicotine habit, It cannot be overlooked that products like this markedly produced more new nicotine consumers that would have never smoked tobacco.
So why have I just spent half of this article boring you with a business history lesson? Well, because I believe, as with history, those who fail to learn from the experiences of others are doomed to repeat them. There is already, in my opinion, strong evidence to suggest that the same mistakes that plagued JUUL are already being made in the cannabis industry.
I fear that the industry will, with all of its limitless potential and innumerable best-intended individuals, through no fault of its own, be led down the same prescribed pathway established by the corrupt capitalists, spineless politicians, and the various industrial complexes that own our entire world.
I worry that if we are not careful, those same powerful individuals, hegemonic organisations, and vested fiscal interests will completely capture, co-opt and consume the cannabis industry in much the same way the industry itself continues to cannibalise the legacy culture it sprang from.
We are already starting to see the consequences of letting our future be written by those hellbent on profiteering from neo-legalisation and not those committed to actually ending the historic injustice of cannabis prohibition.
From the ‘medical cannabis industrial complex’ attempting to medicalise the traditions, rituals, and practices of a culture whose unprotected members continue to have their daily lives restricted and criminalised under prohibition. To the legions of corporate Chad leeches copying and co-opting our vernacular, mannerisms, and identity to commodify, commercialise, and capitalise on every aspect of the legacy cannabis culture.
Yet, while it may be true that the extremely disproportionate concentration of wealth and power under shareholder capitalism inevitably determines the future of any industry, I cannot help but feel that without completely ending cannabis prohibition globally and liberating all cannabis consumers, not even it will be able to completely capture the legacy cannabis culture.
I believe this is most evident in the Canadian cannabis industry, as many of the OG LPs have begun to diversify their portfolios to survive. Tilray, having already pivoted into craft beer, is now moving into fruits and vegetables, while Aurora, having already moved into the fresh produce space, has now started growing orchids.
So, for once in one of my articles, I guess the main takeaway here is an optimistic one. The fact that we have already survived nearly a century of discrimination and criminalisation under prohibition leaves me in no doubt that we will survive the greed of shareholder capitalism, the con of neo-legalisation, and the pharmaceutical industry’s attempts to medicalise our practices, rituals, and culture.
Written for Weed World Magazine By Simpa
