The FDA Just Let Juul Sell a Vape With a Lock on It. It Is the Company's First New Device in a Decade.

The Food and Drug Administration has authorized Juul Labs to sell an updated e-cigarette that can be locked to anyone who cannot prove they are 21, the first new device the company has been cleared to market in more than ten years.

The device is called the Juul2, and it ships with reformulated tobacco- and menthol-flavored cartridges. Its distinguishing feature is an optional connected app: users who enable it must verify their age before the device will operate. Juul says the app also "provides adult consumers insights into their product use, device location," and lets an owner lock the unit "to prevent use by others."

K.C. Crosthwaite, Juul's chief executive, said the company intends to file for authorization of additional flavors "targeted to adult nicotine consumers." That is the harder ask. Flavored cartridges beyond tobacco and menthol are what regulators have most consistently blocked, on the grounds that they are what drew adolescents to the category in the first place.

The FDA went out of its way to frame the decision narrowly. Authorization under the premarket tobacco product pathway is not a finding that a product is safe, and the agency said the clearance is not an endorsement. Its statutory test is whether marketing a product is appropriate for the protection of public health — a population-level calculation that weighs adults who switch away from combustible cigarettes against young people who start nicotine because the product exists. The agency said it must weigh "risks and benefits to the U.S. population as a whole." Company-submitted studies showed that between 20% and 50% of smokers using Juul products quit within six weeks.

The authorization lands on a company that no longer resembles the one that defined the category. Juul has laid off hundreds of employees and settled roughly $3 billion in government and private litigation over its role in the youth vaping surge of the late 2010s, when its sleek, high-nicotine pods became ubiquitous in American high schools. It is no longer the market leader either; that position belongs to Vuse, owned by Reynolds American.

An age-verification lock is the most concrete answer the industry has offered to the objection that has dogged it for a decade — that no amount of retail enforcement stops a device from being handed to a 16-year-old. Whether it works in practice depends on a detail buried in the announcement: the app is optional. A Juul2 sold without it enabled is a vape like any other, and the FDA's clearance covers the device either way.