Between 2015, when a sleek and innovative nicotine delivery device known as Juul hit the market, and 2019, when that product was falsely implicated in a rash of lung injuries, its manufacturer's reputation and financial potential plummeted. The four-part Netflix documentary Big Vape, based on Time correspondent Jamie Ducharme's 2021 book of the same name, is a surprisingly evenhanded and fair-minded account of how that happened.
As even their critics concede, Adam Bowen and James Monsees, the former smokers who founded Juul Labs, were sincerely determined to do well by doing good, offering a potentially lifesaving alternative to combustible cigarettes. Their harm-reducing zeal was widely shared within the company, which helps explain the internal dismay at tobacco giant Altria's 2018 investment in Juul.
