First 280,000 Juul documents publicly available, millions more to come

One of the key provisions of North Carolina’s 2021 settlement with Juul was that the documents produced in litigation would be made available to the public. The settlement required that the documents be made available through a depository run by a North Carolina university. To accomplish this, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries partnered with the UCSF Industry Documents Library to integrate the roughly 4 million documents into the existing Truth Tobacco Documents Library.   The first 280,000 documents are now available online and UNC and UCSF plan to publish the remaining documents monthly, concluding the project in 2025.  

In addition, to the North Carolina settlement documents, the new Juul Labs collection, available directly at https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/tobacco/collections/juul-labs-collection/, contains Juul documents from other sources:

• State of North Carolina v. JUUL Labs, Inc Documents subject to public disclosure under the terms of JUUL Labs’s 2021 settlement with North Carolina, which resolved the state’s lawsuit against the e-cigarette company. North Carolina sued JUUL Labs in 2019, claiming the company’s marketing practices fueled widespread addiction to nicotine among young people and caused a public health crisis. The North Carolina settlement specifies that the documents be made public through a repository operated and maintained by a North Carolina public university. UNC was selected to serve this role and has partnered with IDL to host and preserve the documents for permanent public access.
• State of Minnesota v. Juul Labs, Inc., et al. Documents made publicly available from JUUL Lab’s 2023 settlement with Minnesota in State of Minnesota, by its Attorney General, Keith Ellison, vs. Juul Labs, Inc., et al.. This set of documents includes trial transcripts and 194 trial exhibits.
• US FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products Documents received through a 2018 FOIA request by the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education (CTCRE) to the US FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products regarding JUUL Labs. These records include published scientific papers and reports, internal memos, fact sheets, lab reports, and presentations collected or created by JUUL Labs. The records relate to nicotine chemistry and addiction, toxicology, research on e-cigarettes and e-cigarette use, evaluation of JUUL Labs products, and draft product quality standards.
• Schlesinger Law Documents received via a law firm associated with JUUL Labs litigation. Set contains video and audio interviews with JUUL Labs founders, secondary news sources and marketing materials.

People can search the Juul documents alone, together with all the other tobacco documents, or across all industries in the UCSF Industry Documents Library.

This important new resource can not only inform researchers and the media about Juul’s activities, but will provide an important portal for the FDA to use to cross-check information Juul has provided the agency in its applications.

Check them out!

The UNC announcement provides more information on settlement and partnership between UNC and UCSF.