Six U.S. states announced Wednesday that the e-cigarette manufacturer Juul has agreed to pay $462 million to settle claims surrounding claims of youth vaping addition.
Altogether, Juul has now settled with 45 states for more than $1 billion. In Wednesday’s announced settlement, the e-cigarette company did not admit any wrongdoing.
The states included in the settlement were California, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Mexico and New York along with the District of Columbia. Their attorneys general had jointly accused Juul of targeting minors and falsely claiming e-cigarettes were less addictive than regular cigarettes in its marketing campaigns.
“Juul’s lies led to a nationwide public health crisis and put addictive products in the hands of minors who thought they were doing something harmless,” New York State Attorney General Letitia James said at a news conference.
Juul claims that since 2019, use of its products by kids under age 18 had fallen by 95%. In that year, Juul says it changed its marketing practices as part of a “company-wide reset.”
In 2019 Juul pulled most of its flavored products from the market and halted much of its advertising. The FDA last July put a previous month’s ban on Juul’s products on hold while it reconsidered the action after the company appealed.
“With this settlement, we are nearing total resolution of the company’s historical legal challenges and securing certainty for our future,” Juul said in a statement.
Juul is still facing lawsuits in Alaska Florida, Maine, Michigan and Minnesota—the only five of the 50 states with which the e-cigarette company has yet to settle. A trial is currently under way in Minnesota.
In addition to the state settlements, Juul last year agreed to pay $1.7 billion to settle thousands of lawsuits by local governments and individual consumers.
