(Photo: Joni Hanebutt/Shutterstock.com)

Beasley Allen of Atlanta and Montgomery, Alabama, has filed a lawsuit against JUUL Labs of San Francisco on behalf of an Ohio mother who says her 14-year-old twin daughters became severely addicted to nicotine in middle school after using the company's candy-flavored vaping products disguised to look like flash drives for computers.

The company denied the charges and said it's only trying to offer a safer alternative for those already addicted to cigarettes—the real enemy.

Rene Arana is the plaintiff in the lawsuit in the Court of Common Pleas for Franklin, Ohio. She identified her teen daughters only by their initials.

"J.C. and A.C. are social, bright teenagers who have both developed severe nicotine addictions as a result of Defendants' orchestrated efforts to addict a new generation of teenagers to nicotine," Arana's complaint said. She said the addiction and nicotine withdrawals caused strong mood swings, bouts of anger and aggression, discipline problems, sudden decline in academic performance and even a suicide attempt.

"They continue to be addicted to nicotine, and this addiction will burden these girls for the remainder of their lives," the mother said. "Defendants' wrongful conduct in marketing, promoting, manufacturing, designing, and selling JUUL substantially contributed to J.C. and A.C.'s life-altering injuries."

The complaint tells a dark story of the company's rapid rise to profitability.

"In 2015, JUUL set out to recapture the magic of the most successful product ever made—the cigarette," Arana's complaint said. "Due to regulations and court orders preventing the major cigarette manufacturers from marketing to young people, youth smoking had decreased to its lowest levels in decades. While the public health community celebrated this decline as a victory, JUUL saw an opportunity. Seizing on regulatory inaction and loopholes for e-cigarettes, JUUL set out to develop and market a highly addictive product that could be packaged and sold to young people. Youth is and has always been the most sought-after market for cigarette companies because they are the most vulnerable to nicotine addiction and are most likely to become customers for life."

The mother's legal team includes Andy Birchfield and Joseph VanZandt of Beasley Allen of Atlanta and Montgomery, Alabama, along with Mark Troutman, Shawn Judge, and Gregory Travalio of Isaac, Wiles, Burkholder & Teetor in Columbus, Ohio.

They said Arana—like many parents, teachers and other adult authority figures—had no idea at first that the USB-looking item her girls had was a vaping device. But the complaint alleged that a JUUL pod delivers a higher concentration of nicotine than a pack of cigarettes, at the same time overriding burning in the throat that might slow a smoker down.

"JUUL has created a nicotine addiction epidemic in our country, and families like the Aranas are facing the real consequences caused by JUUL's reckless conduct," VanZandt said in a news release. "Everything JUUL did, from designing the product, manipulating the nicotine, and marketing to minors, was targeted at addicting young people to nicotine. JUUL has made billions of dollars on the backs of America's vulnerable youth; they must be held accountable."

A company spokesman denied the charges and pointed to cigarettes as the real villain.

"JUUL Labs is committed to eliminating combustible cigarettes, the number one cause of preventable death in the world," the spokesman said Thursday. "Our product has always only been intended to be a viable alternative for the one billion current adult smokers in the world. We have never marketed to youth and do not want any non-nicotine users to try our products."

The spokesman said the new complaint "largely copies and pastes unfounded allegations previously raised in other lawsuits which we have been actively contesting for over a year."

"Like the prior cases that this one copies, it is without merit and we will defend our mission throughout this process," the spokesman said. "We strongly advocate for Tobacco 21 legislation, we stopped the sale of non-tobacco and non-menthol based flavored JUULpods to our traditional retail store partners, enhanced our online age-verification process, strengthened our retailer compliance program with over 2,000 secret shopper visits per month, and shut down our Facebook and Instagram accounts while working constantly to remove inappropriate social media content generated by others on those platforms."

And the company called for regulation of its own industry.

"It was our hope that others in the category would self-impose similar restrictions to address youth usage," the spokesman said. "It is now our hope that regulators will impose these same restrictions to protect youth and to preserve the opportunity to eliminate combustible cigarettes, the deadliest legal consumer product known to man."