In Charlottesville, I went to the main library on campus to meet a freshman from Virginia Beach named Katie McCracken, whose contribution to the canon of college Juul-writing was titled “Who Needs a Boyfriend When You Have a Juul?” In high school, she told me, she didn’t smoke or know anyone who did. But at U.V.A. people were Juuling in the dorm lounges, trading Juul hits at parties, repping Juul in their Tinder profiles, Juuling inside bars. “There are bouncers who will sell you a cheap Juul because they just find a ton of them on the ground,” she said. For college kids, drinking and Juuling go together: people who like buzzes tend to mix them.

Katie’s younger brother was a Juuler, she told me—“He does a thing where he Juuls through his nose”—as was her twenty-three-year-old sister, who had switched from cigarettes. (“She sort of looks weird with the Juul, though, because she’s older.”) “I thought Juuls were so dumb when I first saw them,” Katie said. “And then I wrote an article about how Juul is my boyfriend.”

She took out her phone, opened Snapchat, and scrolled through her saved pics and videos: people hitting multiple Juuls simultaneously, her friends in dramatic poses with deadpan expressions and Juuls in their mouths. I burst out laughing at one captioned “100% Headass.” Remembering how I’d sat in that library a decade earlier, sending a text message every few hours, I briefly felt old and sad. It was hard to imagine being in college and swiping through Tinder, watching Instagram Stories, sucking on electronics, getting push alerts about the warming Arctic and the latest Cabinet secretary to be fired. I asked Katie if she thought that Juul relieved her generation’s anxiety or exacerbated it. “I don’t know,” she said. “People definitely stress-Juul. But everything we do is like Tide Pods. Everyone in this generation is semi-ironically, like, We’re ready to die.”

She pulled out her Juul, which was covered in iridescent stickers. Personalization is big among young Juulers; some take a blowtorch to the Juul to turn the finish metallic, or buy “Juul skins” from third-party venders. Juul Wraps, a Florida-based company that sells vinyl vape covers—patterns include the American flag and the slogan “I Love Boobies”—has been so successful that one of its three young co-founders recently bought himself a McLaren. (“To say we’re surprising our friends and family would be an understatement,” one of the other founders told me.)

“Can I . . . maybe hit it?” I asked Katie.

“Here?” she said.

We looked around conspiratorially. The big library lobby was full of people. We were within view of a café, a computer lab, a reference desk. She handed me the Juul, giggling quietly. I stuck it in the wrist of my sweater, inhaled, and blew out a little cloud of vapor. No one noticed. My mouth felt perky.

“Mint!” Katie said.

Three days later, I flew to California to visit Juul’s headquarters, in San Francisco. The company had recently moved from a cramped space in the Mission to a renovated warehouse in the Dogpatch, a gentrifying industrial neighborhood that was full of construction equipment beeping gently in the rain. Inside, the office was open-plan and airy, with forest-green trim on the windows and cream-colored walls. A glossy chocolate Labrador sat in the lunchroom, accepting ear scratches in front of an impressive array of snacks—RxBars, Boomchickapop, M&M’s, waffle cookies—and four fridges filled with LaCroix seltzer and craft beer. Another dog lounged under the table in one of the conference rooms, which are named for San Francisco landmarks: Ocean Beach, Painted Ladies, Candlestick Park. Everyone looked indeterminately hip and focussed, like figures in an architectural rendering, if such figures occasionally Juuled.

There are now around four hundred Juul employees. The company is hiring so rapidly that about twenty new people show up every week at the all-hands meeting. Many of the new hires come from other tech companies: Tesla, Fitbit, Facebook. Some are former smokers who have switched to Juuling—one of the office’s few pieces of visible Juul paraphernalia is a large locked cabinet with a stack of pods that employees can purchase at a discount. But many of the people who work there have never smoked or Juuled, and were averse to even meeting with the company until they were convinced that Juul presented an opportunity to work on a problem of unrivalled magnitude. Ashley Gould, the company’s chief administrative officer, has worked at the genetic-testing company 23andMe and for companies that develop treatments for rare diseases. “I came to feel that I could have greater impact on public health here than at any place I had ever worked before,” she told me.

At the moment, company executives are putting in long hours on the P.M.T.A. process, gunning to secure F.D.A. approval. Juul vaporizers and pods are built in clean rooms in Chinese factories, the all-white kind that require you to scrub in, as if for surgery; to eliminate human error, the company designed an enormous machine, the size of three bedrooms, for filling the pods. Each device undergoes multiple rounds of inspection. (The tests include hooking the vaporizer up to a hose that simulates a person inhaling for three full minutes.) The liquid for the pods is shipped in five-gallon batches, each of which, the company told me, is subjected to a blind human taste test for consistency. (The liquid is manufactured in the United States, though no one would tell me where; a spokesperson for the company called this “competitive information.”)

Juul’s C.E.O., Kevin Burns, who is fifty-four, has a friendly dad-who-loves-his-vacation-house demeanor. He came to Juul from Chobani last October. Burns described Juul to me as a “cigarette-killing company.” Before he accepted the job, he said, he convened an informal focus group in his kitchen with his son, who’s in high school, and a few of his son’s friends. When he asked them about vaping, three kids pulled out their Juuls. He asked them why they had these things, when they got them, how prevalent they were. He realized, he said, that he was looking at a challenge. “We have frustrations about how the product is glorified on social media,” he told me.

Juul is caught in a very particular dilemma: the more appealing the product is for smokers, the more appealing it’s likely to be for everyone else, including teen-agers. At a Manhattan location of Beyond Vape, in March, a sweet-natured clerk named Christ told me that he had smoked two packs a day since he was a teen-ager and that vapes had saved his life. He showed me a vast array of liquids, and explained the appeal of various flavors for people trying to quit cigarettes. (His favorite: Phillip Rocke Honey Cream.) But Juul is frequently condemned for targeting young people with its sweeter flavors, which are limited to mango, crème brûlée, mixed fruit, and cucumber. The company has refrained from introducing new flavors—though it has prototyped “tons” of them, Adam Bowen said.

Many Juulers I talked to found themselves taking in more nicotine with Juul than they had with cigarettes—going through a pod a day, say, when they were never pack-a-day smokers. A low-nicotine option would help ease their dependency, and the company briefly experimented with lighter formulations. Currently, the pods are five per cent nicotine by weight. “You think, Let’s introduce these three-per-cent pods on our most popular flavor—let’s do it on mango,” Burns said. “But the first thing I’ll get after that is a news story about how I’m lowering the bar for young people to initiate.” Juul eventually decided to release low-nicotine pods in mint and tobacco, which will be out later this year. Internationally, Juul plans to introduce an Android app that allows users to track their nicotine intake. (A Juul team is now exploring the market in Central and Western Europe, and an Asia team is in the works.)

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Last year, Juul added a small gray bar to its packaging that reads “The alternative for adult smokers.” The company had considered a bigger, more aggressive statement, but executives were afraid that it would make the product seem edgy, like a parental-advisory warning on a CD cover. (They are also considering dropping the word “cool” from the “cool cucumber” flavor.) In March, Juul filed paperwork to create a political-action committee. In April, the company said that it would spend thirty million dollars to combat underage Juuling, and announced its support for state and federal legislation that would raise the minimum age for tobacco purchases to twenty-one. The company is also developing a “mindfulness curriculum” for high-school students. This will almost certainly be useless, as life in America today is unstable for reasons that go beyond nicotine products. Gould mentioned that the company had thought about producing a P.S.A. “Oh, no,” I said. “Definitely don’t do that. It’ll become a meme.”