Inside the Deadly World of Counterfeit Vape Cartridges | Should You Be Afraid? By VICE

If you could buy the packaging online, then you don't know what is in it, but this could have been cup of vitamin E caught with something else kind of sauce. You know I got to have grub, but I have the granola okay, all right. He had a bunch of in there. I don't know its kind of hard to tell about. You know. What's bootleg, and what's not it's unusual that they're this heavily contaminated? This is potentially deadly this.

This particular cartridge when you're dealing with the black market. Remember that there's risk it's never 100. I just felt like I was going to faint. I realized that there's something wrong with me on the news two or three people have already died. It's interesting that a lot of these cases fell off in the fall of 2019.

It's true it's gone and that's what puzzles us the most like where these people are still vaping out there. We see them all the time like what happened. Why aren't they coming in anymore, vaping, illness, blamed antifa is as clickbait headlines warp our view of the world we're going down the rabbit hole to ask? How afraid should we really be on this episode? The mysterious vaping illnesses of 2019 that created a media frenzy. The centers for disease control is warning people to stop using e-cigarettes following several mysterious deaths, linked to vaping the CDC investigating a medical mystery spreading across the country. Tonight, two new deaths in Minnesota bring the nationwide total to 31 deaths.

Three-Quarters were using THC containing products. Doctors are now warning the public about what they call Italy. There was a lot of confusion at first was this an e-cigarette thing, a TEC thing. There were a lot of question marks. What we know now is that a lung injury called email peaked in september 2019.

By February 2020 2800 cases and 68 deaths were linked to the injury, but where did Diwali come from, and should we still be afraid of vaping? I started going down the rabbit hole by first reaching out to Greg Rodriguez, who was sick with the volume in September 2019. I remember thinking that it was a miracle. You know these vapes because there was no smell yeah, no more, no dryer sheets right. I remember those days but yeah exactly tell me about the onset of you starting to get sick. I felt very dehydrated.

Furthermore, I felt like I was my chest was just becoming very tight. It started to vomit like a greenish yellowish type substance which in hindsight it was what was this vitamin E acetate that my body was trying to reject after checking into a hospital in Queens, Greg, was put into a coma by doctors and brought here to the long island Jewish hospital. We sat down with Greg's physician who treated Greg along with some of the first Diwali cases in New York. So how did you meet Greg? So we got called from one of our sister hospitals, forest hills, uh that they had a young patient that they had just put on events later in the her they wanted to. Let us know that they were worried.

They were going to run into trouble and could we think about putting him on echo? What is echo exactly echo's extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, where we take the blood out of someone's body, and we oxygenate it in an oxygenated outside the body and then put it back in, so we use it as a replacement for your lungs when your lungs are not working and it sort of buys you time for your lungs to get better. I think we cleaned out his lungs every single day for the first two days and what came back with him was just this thick caramel looking stuff just his lungs were filled with it. This is his original chest x-ray when he came in and if you look here, you could see that both of the lungs are involved. There are the lungs should all be black like that and his lungs, you can see, have a lot of white areas here. None of that should be there.

What exactly in the vaping caused these illnesses? I still think we don't know for sure. I think a lot of people have a lot of different theories and some think it was the vitamin E that was mixed in with the vaping product and some people think it was the flavoring. Some people think it was just the marijuana, the way that it was heated and mixed in some way. So I think we have an exact answer. While the science is not fully understood, it's thought that additives in the vaping oils break down and change.

When heated at the high temperatures required for vaping, when these substances cool down, they may cause inflammation or coat the walls of the lungs and debris unprepared. For these foreign objects, the lungs push the body into crisis mode. When this came out, we started to see news stories like you should stop smoking e-cigarettes. This is an e-cigarette thing, and then it slowly shifted that the story, the picture- became a little more clear that it was oh, maybe it's mostly THC products, but then still certain people said that they didn't vape THC, that it was only nicotine. Do you believe that it's possible to get some of these illnesses from just vaping? Nicotine, or do you think that they maybe weren't exactly being totally truthful.

We definitely saw patients who told us it was. They only were taking nicotine, I think they were truthful. I do think that they don't know what they were taking for Craig. That's exactly what happened. Basically, yeah.

I had decided to stop buying off the street, and then I decided to take the risk of buying them in bulk on the dark web. So I thought I hit the jackpot, and it turns out that I made a huge mistake with uh trying to get a good deal when I first started to vape, it was easy to spot a fake car. Then summer, 2019 these fake cars um came out the oil inside it was so thick, and it just looked the same color it just felt so real. What Greg is referring to here is known as the bubble test, a low-fi way to spot a fake cart. A high purity distillate would mean the bubble in the cartridge moves slowly or not at all, when it is turned upside down.

However, pure THC extract can be too thick to constantly flow to the coil, so cutting agents like terpenes can be added for both flavor and flow counterfeiters who might dilute the product for bigger profits could then add vitamin E acetate to re-thicken the extract, fooling the bubble test and the consumer. The CDC says that vitamin E acetate is strongly linked to the valley outbreak in 2019. But how prevalent is this dirty card industry? I asked Greg how hard it was to find a marketplace in the dark web. Anyone who wants to know would just go on Google and type in dark web the best marketplaces. Okay, it seems like you know it's that easy.

You know, but yeah. It really is, after some surprisingly easy: google searches. I booted up my VPN downloaded tor and started browsing the dark web you're going on the dark web. Don't you want to go? Oh okay, we're in the tour all right. So now I'm on the dark web.

What do we get here? You get a fake ID driver's license to have LSD for 30 bucks, euro banknotes, wow. You can get counterfeit money on here. Unbelievable just spend money to make money. What, if I find my credit card information on here, that'd be really wild. Okay, we're here for purpose, we're just looking for weed cannabis, concentrates, live resin better than sex better than money.

Is it after finding dozens of vendors at dell THC carts? I slid into some dms. Well, I didn't get too many responses back. I did get a suggestion. I could easily find dirty carts in places like liquor or corner stores. With some spots in mind, I met up with the dower hour aficionado and sometimes camera operator taxi main to do some undercover research, so we're in Brooklyn right now where cannabis is legal, but that doesn't mean that you can't buy underground THC cartridges at a number of smoke and vape shops.

So we're going to go look around see what these stores have, and I'm wearing a wire and uh. Hopefully I don't get caught can't see anything right can't see anything. I'm wearing a wire here. Look! Okay! All right! Let's go check it out! Oh, I'm! So sketched out by myself. I wouldn't sell to me all right: hey man! You guys got greens, no, no, okay, no go! There's a couple more down here.

I think it was a little sketched out by me, though I mean we just look like we're hanging out right, okay, the next one's right up here and then, what's going on, you got any greens right now: growth and these are legit right. These uh these are bootleg right. How much are they 140. All right? One day when I get paid man I'll be back all right, so you had a bunch of in there. They were 140 a piece all right, we're going just across the street.

Hey man how's it going. How are you doing good? How are you doing? Do you guys have greens THC cartridges yeah? How much of these guys 70 70.45. yeah, it's good stuff! I've read about, though I've read that they've got the bootleg, but there are bootlegs out there, these uh so far, people coming all right. That's all good man thanks dude yeah uh. He had a bunch of carts.

He had like half grams of grams. I don't know its kind of hard to tell about you know: what's bootleg and what's not, we were given a sample of a bodega bot, THC cartridge, there's nothing in these right now, so I'm not in possession of THC. It looked real to me with nice, packaging and branding, but was it I connected with push a distributor of THC carts in New York city to see if he knew anything about these corner store carts, I went shopping for some cartridges at a bodega. Do like any of your. You know.

I don't do nothing like that. No, you know where those cards come from. I mean most likely they come from l. a. If not somebody, maybe they make them here.

The THC cartridges that you're selling out here are they licensed to be made in California yeah. Some of them all have that are actual, have license and there's a lot of vape brands in California that operate in the gray market. They have their own original packaging and their own original. You know liquid, but they don't want to jump through the hoops to get licensed. What's the quality of something that's in the gray market? Sure I mean you can find perfect like.

I try to stick with brands that haven't gotten so big that they're, you know counterfeited if I could buy the packaging. Oh mine, I don't want that. I showed push the sample we had obtained to get his opinion on it. The main thing is the packaging like this. Are you know somebody spent good money to design all this? They got big enough and then somebody else said well.

We want to rip that brand off, and they knew somebody a graphic designer. They knew somebody in China, and they just duplicated it. And now this is a clone. You don't know what the is in this. It's not like.

You met big chief right. I don't know big chief sure, so now you're doing the bubble test right. Well, that ain't moving. Okay, that's not moving, so somebody that would only go by the bubble test would say. Oh, this is good, because this doesn't move it's not moving at all, which would probably mean that you don't want to hit this thing rather than the bubble test.

Push showed me what he called the Google test to avoid counterfeit brands. So big chief packaging is what you showed me right. So the first thing that pops up is that holy. So let me see that again. This is exactly okay.

Look. You could buy 150 pieces of this at 214, a piece wow that looks legit right so that yeah, that looks nice. That looks exactly the same holy. So I have no idea, you don't know what this is. You don't know what's in that push showed me a number of different cart brands that have counterfeit clones, each of them.

Looking like the real deal, big chief right now, their actual website was all the way down here. Do they have anything on their side about? You know uh yeah, here's how to verify the problem. Okay! Is there a code somewhere there? It is oh, not authentic, no way yeah, so somebody's selling this at bodegas in Brooklyn it is not legitimate. That's just crazy man, yeah google test, google test for the win, realizing that I had a counterfeit cartridge. I had to find out what was actually in this thing I reached out to pro Verde labs to run some tests on our sample.

The lab results that came back were alarming, to say the least. The sample exceeded the acceptable amount for eight pesticides, as well as containing concentration of vitamin E acetate. We saw this in there at about eight percent little eight and a half percent. This is potentially deadly this. This particular cartridge.

The pesticides were there at such a heavy concentration that we had to do further. Dilutions uh enable to analyze that and still be within our calibration per range wow. It's unusual that they're this heavily contaminated. Were you surprised to find vitamin E acetate in this cartridge? I was it's well known, there's better alternatives. I thought by now that there would be no more in production and that what had been produced would have already been either purchased, consumed or disposed of.

Apparently, that's not the case and then, in addition, I mean you usually find some levels of pesticides, but this one had um a lot of pesticides. You know we see in this one biphenyzate at 190, 000 parts per billion. This is 190 times what would be permissible in California? I don't know what the long-term effect of consuming a product like this would be, but it's not good. The pesticides were not meant to be put in our body. Are vaping products safe or is the market just so unregulated that it's not even worth the risk? All states now have a supply chain of regulated, safe produced products.

If you're sourcing products from reputable uh suppliers. I don't think that there's any concern for that. So I'm just curious to know as a professional like yourself. What do you think the media got right, and what do you think the media got wrong in this situation? I think, as human beings, we try to simplify things into our. What we're capable of understanding- and I think the problem with the vape crisis is its a very, very complex issue.

When we see these acute things happening, people dying, we look for the culprit and I think it's so hard because I think there's a mixture of components that may be responsible for the hazards associated with it, not just the vitamin E acetate. So the vitamin E acetate is very much like that could affect you in the very short term, whereas these other, the flavorings and the pesticides. We don't know what the long-term consequences of them are sure they could be. They could result in. You know generations of increased lung cancer.

Because of these we don't we don't know, you know these could be 10 20 years out till we do. We understand it, I mean think about the tobacco industry, and we may find the same thing.10 years down the road with vape products associated with cannabis or nicotine. This story doesn't really have an ending toxic vape cartridges will continue to flood the streets, nicotine THC legal gray, market and black market it's out there, and even though we don't hear much about a volley anymore, it still seems very easy to find vitamin E acetate and counterfeit cartridges. The news cycle seems to have washed away the story, as we all moved on to more immediate problems, which there are a lot of these days, but whether you vape or are impacted by stories that have faded from the front page. The only way to stay informed is to take matters into your own hands and do what push does google, it is foreign.

Source : VICE