Dallas-based medical journalist Laura Beil is known for award-winning stories in publications like Texas Monthly, Cosmopolitan and The New York Times. Recently, she’s added a new skill to her repertoire: In 2019, Elle magazine called her “the voice of true crime podcasting.” Beil’s first audio hit, Dr. Death, about a deranged spine surgeon, has been re-created as a TV crime drama starring Joshua Jackson, Alec Baldwin and Christian Slater, due next month on NBC’s streaming platform, Peacock.
Now, Beil and podcast production company Wondery are back with a new project, The Vaping Fix, a six-part series that has already risen to No. 1 on Apple’s podcast charts. The Vaping Fix tells the story of Juul, the e-cigarette maker blamed for hooking scores of teens on nicotine.
In Beil’s telling, the tale is a complex one of Silicon Valley idealism mixed with greed, politics and addiction. She follows Juul’s founders from their days as Stanford graduate students hoping to reduce the harmful effects of smoking. She spoke about the challenges of writing for audio and how she talked Alec Baldwin through his role in Dr. Death.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
I have to say that I’ve listened to the first few episodes and am already hooked.
That’s really good to hear. I was worried about this podcast because no one dies. No one’s killing people. It’s just a complicated story about when Silicon Valley gets into the harm-reduction business.
How did you get on to this story, and what grabbed you about it?
It was an interest of Hernan Lopez, who was the CEO of Wondery at the time, so I started looking into it. I always like stories that have a complexity to them, and I might have gotten in a little over my head with this one in terms of complexity.
How do you mean?
There were so many different facets to understanding this. Tobacco harm reduction is a very, very fierce public health debate with people who are evangelical on both sides.
There’s no arguing that smoking is deadly and no one should do it. But it’s also true that nicotine is one of the most extremely difficult drugs to quit. The average smoker attempts to quit 30 times before they’re successful. Those people should have something to help them. That’s the one side. The other side is that Juul made this super cool, highly addictive drug-delivery device and put it out there, and didn’t really think about all the consequences of putting it out there.
I can see both sides of this because I’ve got kids. I do not want them anywhere near nicotine, but my mother-in-law is a two-pack-a-day smoker. And I would love for her to use Juul, frankly.
Did you find any evidence that Juul intended to hook teens on vaping?
I never found any evidence of that. What I found is that they thought of this product too much like an iPhone and less like a drug-delivery device. And all of their mistakes really stemmed from that one central thing. They’re in Silicon Valley and they were consumed by the whole Silicon Valley ethos.
What were some of the challenges you encountered in reporting the podcast?
Going in, I thought, “There’s so many people who used to work at Juul who would want to tell this story.” But as I got into it I discovered that everyone who worked at Juul was made to sign these really draconian confidentiality agreements. I approached more than 200 people to try to get them to talk. Of those, I talked to about 20 and many wouldn’t go on tape. One thing about audio is if you don’t have it on tape, you can’t really tell the story.
How did you work around that challenge, including the fact that Juul’s founders Adam Bowen and James Monsees, who are central to the story, also declined to be interviewed?
It was a team effort. Besides me, there was a team of three other producers who’ve been working their hearts out on this. Denise Chan, a freelance audio producer in LA, is one of these young, super smart people that gives you faith in the future of our profession. She scoured the internet for every bit of audio we could find, including social media and city council meetings. I didn’t want them to be these two-dimensional people.
How do you feel about Dr. Death being turned into a celebrity-studded TV series?
It was kind of surreal seeing the preview. It’s a weird experience, because I know the actual story so well.
I did have some casual conversations with the head writer. And I can tell you that, while it is a work of fiction, they were trying to adhere to the actual story as much as possible. So I appreciated that, but I don’t know what the final product is. I’ll find out when everybody else does.
What do you think of the casting choices?
They all seem like great actors.
I did have a conversation with Alec Baldwin, just about the character and my impressions of him.
Really? How did that come about?
He sent me a message through Twitter, and so we just talked about the case. He was trying to understand the person he was portraying [Dr. Robert Henderson, one of the physicians who worked to uncover the main character’s wrongdoing]. I did ask him, why don’t you talk to the actual Dr. Henderson? And he said that he doesn’t usually like to do that because the character that you’re playing in the movie version is based on a real person, but it’s not actually that person.
Is there anything else you want people to know about The Vaping Fix?
I do hope people who think they know this story will listen with an open mind. Just because I didn’t find any evidence that there was some secret plot to market to teenagers, it doesn’t mean I’m trying to be an apologist for the mistakes that they did make. It’s one of those stories where probably everybody’s going to hate me, because if you’re really pro-Juul, you’re not going to like that there’s a lot about the story that’s not very flattering to them. And if you’re really anti-Juul, you’re not going to like that I didn’t portray them as villains out to wreck teenagers’ lives and create customers for life. I just tried to be fair. I tried to be thorough and I did try to be fair.
