The company resisted hiring people with experience in the regulated tobacco industry, ostensibly out of contempt for Big Tobacco. Someone with that background might have helped the company avoid its advertising blunders and better manage e-cigarette regulation the Food and Drug Administration was writing. But then "the disruptor" Juul became "the co-conspirator," Ms. Ducharme says, accepting in 2018 a $12.8 billion investment from cigarette-maker Altria, designed in part to lend Juul regulatory expertise. The Altria investment receives an extended treatment in Lauren Etter's "The Devil's Playbook: Big Tobacco, Juul, and the Addiction of a New Generation." In 2018, Altria told the FDA that it would discontinue its line of e-cigarettes, but soon after, it invested in Juul behind the FDA's back.Then again, regulators were threatening Juul with extinction due to teen vaping. Ms. Etter, a reporter for Bloomberg News, notes that former FDA head Scott Gottlieb's "cage-rattling had the unfortunate effect of torpedoing upcoming rounds of private investment," making money from the big bad cigarette-maker Altria look more attractive to Juul. The most engaging part of Ms. Etter's book has to do with "a formidable group of wealthy parents whose children had fallen prey to Juul" at schools like Sacred Heart, in Atherton, Calif. (tuition: $47,826). A Manhattan mom on the Upper West Side married to "the founder of a well-known private-equity firm" didn't "give it another thought" when her son "asked her for an incense burner. He's so spiritual, she thought, affectionately," Ms. Etter writes. "How was it possible," the mother asks, "that there had been a teen cultural revolution and most adults hadn't even noticed?" How indeed. An investment manager with kids at Sacred Heart tapped out a mafioso-style note to Kevin Burns, at the time CEO of Juul: "From here on out, I'm going to go out of my way to fight the bulls—that you all are doing there and will be more than vocal about it. I have deep ties in the investment world and am from Washington DC and have deep ties there, all of which I will leverage to the max." These parents are presented as "grassroots" campaigners bent on extinguishing Juul. But what about society's obligations to, say, the middle-aged black man who has never kicked his smoking habit with nicotine gum or patches? Or the blue-collar kid, age 19 or 20, who leaned on cigarettes to manage the stress and boredom of a long deployment to Afghanistan?