Now, after making billions of dollars and joining forces with Big Tobacco, Juul is billing itself as a public-health crusader.

Juul is far from the first company to attempt a humanitarian makeover. Facebook, an outgrowth of a Harvard student’s juvenile attempt to quantify the attractiveness of his classmates, now claims to have been motivated by a virtuous impulse to connect the world; Uber, created by two tech entrepreneurs who wanted to zoom around San Francisco in luxury cars, later tried to convince people that it wanted to provide affordable mobility to the masses.

But in Juul’s case, revisionist history is particularly important, because the way Juul markets itself is central to the question of how it should be treated. Many consumers, investors and ethical technologists would rightly shun a company that knowingly targeted minors with harmful products, and cleaned up its act only after public pressure. But if you believe that Juul had a noble anti-cigarette mission all along, it’s easier to excuse its missteps as the product of innocent naïveté.

Unfortunately for Juul, plenty of evidence suggests that the company didn’t always take its public health agenda so seriously.

In 2015, in an interview with The Verge, Ari Atkins, a research and development engineer who helped create the original Juul, said that “we don’t think a lot about addiction here because we’re not trying to design a cessation product at all.”

He added that “anything about health is not on our mind.”

In other early interviews, James Monsees, Juul’s co-founder and chief product officer, played down the idea of a public health mission.

“We’re not an activist company,” he said in a 2014 interview. “If you don’t like what we’re making better than cigarettes, then have a cigarette, that’s fine.”