MEXICO CITY – In northern Mexico, the owners of a vape store found themselves defenseless when a drug cartel targeted their business.

The cartel took two employees hostage, blindfolded them, and demanded a meeting with the store’s management. The cartel intended to seize the store’s operations, allowing it to sell only online outside the region.

“They don’t ask if you’re willing to hand over your business; they inform you of what’s going to happen,” explained one of the owners, now residing in the United States under a cloak of anonymity to avoid potential retaliation.

This incident took place in early 2022, when vaping was still legal in Mexico, and the market was valued at $1.5 billion. However, earlier this month, Mexico prohibited the sale—though not the use—of electronic cigarettes. Experts anticipate that organized crime will tighten its grip on the trade of these products.

“By implementing a ban, you essentially transfer the market to non-governmental groups,” said Zara Snapp, director of the Ría Institute in Mexico, which focuses on drug policy across Latin America. This, in a nation plagued by corruption and cartel-related violence.

The prohibition could also bolster the cartels by providing them with an additional income stream, one not heavily scrutinized by the U.S. government, given that vapes remain legal there, noted Alejandro Rosario, a lawyer for several vape retailers.

Push to ban

Vaping is legal and regulated in the U.S. and Europe, but it’s now banned in at least eight Latin American countries. Some countries, like Japan, have used e-cigarettes to reduce tobacco use, but regulation has been on the rise, supported by the World Health Organization, which is concerned about growing teen use.

Former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, an outspoken critic of vaping, banned the import and sale of e-cigarettes.

When Mexico’s Supreme Court declared that ban unconstitutional, López Obrador pushed for a constitutional amendment, which passed in January 2025 under his successor, President Claudia Sheinbaum. Electronic cigarettes are now included alongside the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl, something many lawyers see as totally out of proportion.

However, the lack of a law to implement the ban left a loophole, and vapes continued entering Mexico from China — the main producer — and the U.S. In December, they could still be found for sale in many shops and online.

Still, authorities carried out raids and seizures. Last February, 130,000 electronic cigarettes were seized in the port of Lazaro Cardenas.

Aldo Martínez, 39, a Mexico City shop owner, was fined $38,000 for selling the devices, fought the ruling and eventually did not have to pay.

But in December, the legal loophole was closed. A new law prohibits virtually everything about vapes except consumption, imposing fines and prison sentences of up to eight years. Martínez immediately stopped selling e-cigarettes, even though they accounted for two-thirds of his income. “I don’t want to go to jail,” he said.

Martínez and his friends will consume his remaining inventory, but he fears authorities could raid his shop and plant vapes there in an attempt to extort him.

Consumers are also concerned that authorities could extort them because while it is not illegal to possess vapes, the new law is unclear about the number of devices that can still be considered as personal use.

“If I make a vague law … I give corrupt authorities the ability to interpret it in a way to extort people,” said Juan José Cirión Lee, a lawyer and president of the collective Mexico and the World Vaping. He plans to challenge the new regulations in court, saying they are ambiguous and full of contradictions.

Cartels corner market

While Mexico’s ban was being forged, organized crime expanded its share of the sector across northern states and the country’s largest cities, Guadalajara and Mexico City. Sometimes, they even marked their product with stickers or stamps to distinguish their brand, reminiscent of their stamped fentanyl pills.

Rosario, the lawyer, talked of intimidation, extortion and violence that forced sellers in states like Sonora to get out of the business. Others, like some of his former clients in Sinaloa, decided to sell vapes supplied by the cartel, which promised they would have no problems with authorities, he said.

“I have lost about 40% of my clients,” Rosario said.

The shop owner now living in the U.S. said he was comparatively lucky, because the cartel paid something for the business and sought the owners’ expertise on how it worked.

The cartel already knew everything about them, including addresses and the names of relatives, he said. He and his co-owner are now closing their online business because they do not want to choose between the cartel and prison sentences under the new ban.

A longtime seller in Mexico City, who also requested anonymity to avoid reprisals, said some of his clients had been intimidated by thugs for buying their vapes online, while one of his suppliers sold his inventory to organized crime groups.

The cheapest and most popular devices — the most interesting to the cartels — are disposable. Some countries have banned them because of the plastic, electronic and chemical waste.

According to Rosario, the cartels are already presenting themselves as suppliers and formal businesses, with some even buying the disposable shells direct from Asian manufacturers to fill themselves. Given the lack of regulation, that raises the potential for adulterated products from organizations that already handle all manner of illicit drugs.

A recent report by the Mexican nongovernmental organization Defensorxs said the Jalisco New Generation Cartel has “businesses dedicated to repackaging Asian vapes,” while other criminal organizations, including the Sinaloa cartel, and smaller criminal groups in Mexico City and Acapulco operate in the vape black market.

Mixed results

Mexico’s ban took effect Jan. 16. The next day, authorities confiscated more than 50,000 vapes and displayed them in Mexico City’s central square. Mayor Clara Brugada framed the enforcement as necessary to protect young people.

For the lawyer Cirión Lee, that’s absurd. Banned products attract youth, and now “those selling cocaine, fentanyl, marijuana are selling you vapes” and they do not care if the buyer is a minor, he said.

Experiences in other countries have varied. Brazil banned vapes in 2009, but they are widely used by young people. In the U.S. however, where they are not banned, vaping among adolescents fell in 2024 to the lowest level in a decade as regulation increased.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and most scientists agree that, based on available evidence, electronic cigarettes are far less dangerous than traditional cigarettes.

Snapp, the drug policy researcher, insists that Mexico’s ban is a setback by removing a safer alternative to cigarettes.

Some consumers are asking their trusted suppliers to stay open, said the man who lost his business to a cartel in 2022. He said lately people have been making “panic buys” for months of supply amid uncertainty about the future.

One young entrepreneur near Mexico’s northern border said he has been able to operate beneath the radar because he has neither stores nor a website. He does everything with his telephone, through calls and messages, he said, requesting anonymity for safety.

He said so far the cartels have left him alone because he does not sell disposable vapes, but he plans to be more careful. He expects that sooner or later the whole market will be in the hands of organized crime.

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