Jamie Ducharme spent 2020 split between two public health crises. By day, she covered the COVID-19 pandemic as a health correspondent for Time magazine. In the early mornings, late evenings and weekends, she wrote a book about a different epidemic: vaping, and more specifically, how Juul Labs Inc. impacted the e-cigarette industry and a whole generation of smokers.

In May 2021, Ducharme, who graduated from Northeastern University in 2016, released “Big Vape: The Incendiary Rise of Juul,” a deep-dive into how the company went from a startup with hopes of helping adults quit smoking to a massive corporation drawing scrutiny for allegedly targeting teens in its marketing and, running counter to its original goal by getting more people hooked on tobacco.

It’s a story many know, but now even more will gain insight into Juul and the controversy surrounding it when Netflix releases “Big Vape: The Rise and Fall of Juul,” a docuseries based on Ducharme’s book.

“I definitely think it’s eye-opening,” Ducharme said. “Everyone knows kids were vaping in school bathrooms, but I don’t think most people know the backstory — how Juul was founded — and I don’t think most people know how little e-cigs have been regulated and how many questions are out there.”

The four-part series premieres on the streaming service on Oct. 11. Directed by Emmy-award winning director R.J Cutler, the series tells the story laid out in Ducharme’s book, but also builds on it with new interviews and information. 

When Ducharme wrapped up writing at the end of 2020, e-cigarette companies were retroactively applying with the FDA to stay on the market. Since then, the FDA recalled Juul and then walked back on the recall to do another review of the product.  

The docuseries includes this back and forth, as well as interviews with other journalists, such as Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz, and subject matter experts on marketing and startups who give their expert perspectives on the rise and fall of Juul. (Ducharme herself also appears and served as a consulting producer on the project.)

“It’s a really nice companion (to the book),” Ducharme said. “There are people interviewed in the doc who are not in the book. There are people in the book who are not in the doc. Having the two together gives an even richer and broader perspective of the company and where it went right and where it went wrong.”

The miniseries also plays into the visual element of the story: The trailer features gruesome shots of teens with tubes going into their chest and images of lungs damaged by vaping interspersed between interviews, court hearing footage and clips of people vaping on social media, the same ones that saturated many feeds and helped normalize e-cigarettes.

“It was completely fascinating because writing a book, you’re so focused on getting the right quotes and interviews and having the right data,” Ducharme said. “When you’re making a series, it’s visual. They were really interested in…[B roll footage, photos, and social media posts] that showed all this stuff I couldn’t include in the book for format limitations, so it was really cool to see the story told in that different way.”

Ducharme did not set out to write a book that’d become a docuseries, describing it as a “very pleasant surprise” when Amblin Television approached her about the project. In fact, she hadn’t set out to write a book about Juul until she published a cover story for Time in September 2019 about how the e-cigarette company hooked teens on their product.

“I had covered Juul for a couple years…predominantly from a health and science angle,” she said. “I felt like there was so much more to look into about the company, the people who ran it, and the different impacts that had on various segments of the U.S. population. What I set out to do in the book is tell the entire story of Juul up to that point and the growth of the U.S. vaping industry as a whole instead of just covering it through the health and science that I had mostly been doing.”

Prior to joining Time, Ducharme was the health editor for Boston magazine, a position she secured after doing a co-op there. It was then she also found her passion for health writing.

“I always say, I fully attribute my career to the Northeastern co-op program,” she said. “My first co-op…ended up becoming my first job out of college. That job really was like a springboard to landing at Time. So I am forever grateful to the co-op program and getting that work experience which is so important in a field like journalism where it can be very hard to break in.”

Erin Kayata is a Northeastern Global News reporter. Email her at e.kayata@northeastern.edu. Follow her on Twitter @erin_kayata.