This school district is the first in Kentucky to sue e-cigarette manufacturers
Bullitt County Public Schools became the first school system in Kentucky on Monday to sue e-cigarette manufacturers for allegedly causing a youth vaping epidemic that has been a financial drain on the school district.
The county’s Board of Education unanimously voted at its Wednesday, Nov. 25 board meeting to give the district permission to file the suit against “manufacturers, distributors and sellers” of e-cigs and vaping products, specifically California-based JUUL Labs, Inc., the nation’s largest e-cig manufacturer. Bullitt County schools are blaming these companies for enticing a generation of young people into inadvertent nicotine addiction, and, in turn, forcing the school system to dedicate a disproportionate amount of time and money to support those students.
Ron Johnson, a Louisville-based attorney representing Bullitt County, filed the district’s 76-page lawsuit late Monday afternoon in federal district court for Western Kentucky. It argues that school districts across Kentucky have been “uniquely and disproportionately impacted” by JUUL’s “youth-targeted product design and marketing, and years of misstatements and omissions regarding its products.”
A handful of Kentuckians have filed lawsuits against e-cigarette companies for alleged false advertising and marketing their highly-addictive products to young people, but Bullitt County appears to be the first district to do so. It has three high schools, six middle schools and 13 elementary schools, according to the district website.
By making a product that appeals to kids with flavors such as “bubble gum and gummy bear,” and by “falsely marketing it as a safer alternative to tobacco, JUUL has undone decades [worth of] educational effort and expense to keep children safe from nicotine addiction,” Johnson said in a statement.
The lawsuit seeks to prevent these companies from further selling or marketing to kids, but it also makes the case that this tactic, which has led to soaring rates of vaping in teenagers and young adults, has depleted district resources.
District staff “spend a significant amount of time and resources providing counseling and educational services to students” who vape, the board-approved resolution reads. Vaping in school interrupts the education process and forces teachers to devote still more time disciplining students for vaping in school, the resolution said.
As a result, the district “believes it is entitled to compensation for its efforts and resources expended to combat vaping by its students.” Exactly how much the district will seek hasn’t yet been determined, Superintendent Jesse Bacon said on Monday by phone.
JUUL is the target of dozens of lawsuits across the country, but not nearly as many are coming from school districts. In October, about a month after the White House moved to ban all flavored e-cigs once young people began to be hospitalized in droves for vaping-related illnesses, school districts in Kansas, Missouri and New York sued JUUL for forcing them to exhaust their districts’ resources as they responded to rampant e-cigarette addiction among students.
The U.S. Surgeon General has characterized teenage use of vaping products as an epidemic, which has so far killed 42 people and sickened another 2,172 people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In Kentucky, 38 cases of potential vaping-related illnesses are being investigated by the CDC. Five cases have been confirmed, and 10 are considered probable, according to the Department for Public Health. Of the five confirmed cases, one involved a boy under the age of 18, a state public health official said. Superintendent Bacon said no students in his district have yet been hospitalized from vaping.
But since about 2015 in Bullitt County, when JUUL products first hit store shelves, vaping among students as young as sixth grade has been “absolutely the number one issue we face,” Bacon said.
According to the lawsuit, nicotine-related confiscations by staff across the district rose by nearly 84 percent between the 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 school years.
Statewide last year, e-cigarettes replaced alcohol as the most used substance among teenagers, according to a Kentucky Incentives for Prevention survey, and vaping rates among middle and high schoolers doubled between 2016 and 2018. For high school sophomores between 2017 and 2018, vaping rates jumped 66 percent.
“We’ve just gotten to the point where nothing we have tried is successful,” Bacon said. “This is the next step we need to take to protect our kids. We don’t expect we’ll be the last district to sign on.”
That’s likely true, said Johnson, who is in talks with multiple districts across the commonwealth about filing their own lawsuits. He expects “several others” to be filed by the end of the year: “I think school districts are just starting to understand how much this has cost them in terms of resources.”
This story was originally published December 3, 2019 at 8:27 AM.
