We founded Students Against Vaping E-cigarettes (SAVe) to educate young people about the dangers of flavored e-cigarettes and warn them about the dangers of vaping & warn them about the predatory behavior of e-cigarette companies towards teens. We were motivated by an April, 2018 incident in which a JUUL representative entered our high-school through an outside anti-addiction group and, without the school’s knowledge and without teachers present, told us and our then-ninth-grade classmates that Juul was “totally safe” and would receive FDA approval “any day”.

Though it would be almost another 9 months before the US Health Secretary and Surgeon General would declare youth vaping an “epidemic”, our SAVe team publicly sounding the alarm about health crisis that we and our friends were experiencing in real time, sharing our story with officials at FDA, FTC, and in the US Congress. (Our July, 2019 testimony about JUUL has been cited by FDA & many others as evidence that the company directly marketed to minors).