Vaping Bad: Were two brothers from Wisconsin the Walter Whites of THC oils?

The drug bust shattered the early morning stillness of this manicured subdivision in southeastern Wisconsin.

The police pulled up outside a white-shuttered brick condo, jolting neighbours out of their beds with the thud of heavy banging on a door.

What they found inside was not crystal meth or cocaine or fentanyl but slim boxes of vaping cartridges labelled with flavours like strawberry and peaches and cream. An additional 98,000 cartridges lay empty.

Fifty-seven Mason jars nearby contained a substance that resembled dark honey: THC-laced liquid used for vaping, a practice that is now at the heart of a major public health scare sweeping the country.

Vaping devices, which have soared in popularity as a way to consume nicotine and THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, have been linked in the last several months to nearly 400 illnesses and six deaths.

State and federal health investigators have not yet determined a cause, but authorities are focusing on whether noxious chemicals have found their way into vaping supplies, perhaps from a flourishing nationwide black market of vaping products fuelled by online sales and lax regulation.

The bust this month in Wisconsin, where THC is illegal, offers an intimate look at the shadowy operations serving large numbers of teenagers and adults around the country who are using black-market vaping products, sometimes unknowingly because it is difficult to tell them apart from legitimate ones.

“When we walked in there, we were like: ‘Oh boy',” said Captain Dan Baumann of the Waukesha Police Department. “This is what we were looking for, but we did not know it was this big.”

Key players in the operation, authorities said, were brothers barely into their 20s, Jacob and Tyler Huffhines, who lived in a small town nearby.

Both are now in custody at the Kenosha County Jail. More arrests and charges in the case are likely to follow, according to the police.

Investigators have not determined whether there is a connection between the Wisconsin operation and any of the cases of severe lung diseases linked to vaping.

But public health officials across the country, including Mitch Zeller, director of the Centre for Tobacco Products for the Food and Drug Administration, say that street-made vaping products should be avoided by all consumers and pose the greatest health risk.

Vaping works by heating liquid and turning it into vapour to be inhaled.

The original intent was to give smokers a way to satisfy their nicotine cravings without inhaling the carcinogens that come with burning tobacco.

But vaping devices and cartridges can be used to heat many substances, including cannabis-based oils, and some of the solvents used to dissolve them can present their own health problems.

The Trump administration said on Wednesday it planned to ban most flavoured e-cigarettes and nicotine pods – including mint and menthol, in an effort to reduce the allure of vaping for teenagers.

But the move may expand underground demand for flavoured pods. And it does nothing to address the robust trade in illicit cannabis vaping products.

The Wisconsin operation is wholly characteristic of a “very advanced and mature illicit market for THC vape carts,” said David Downs, an expert in the marijuana trade and California bureau chief for Leafly, a website that offers news, information and reviews of cannabis products. (“Carts” is the common shorthand for cartridges.)

“These types of operations are integral to the distribution of contaminated THC-based vape carts in the United States,” Mr Downs said.

They are known as “pen factories”, playing a crucial middleman role: the operations buy empty vape cartridges and counterfeit packaging from Chinese factories, then fill them with THC liquid that they purchase from the US market.

Empty cartridges and packaging are also available on eBay, Alibaba and other e-commerce sites.

The filled cartridges are not by definition a health risk. However, Mr Downs, along with executives from legal THC companies and health officials, say that the illicit operations are using a tactic common to other illegal drug operations: cutting their product with other substances, including some that can be dangerous.

The motive is profit; an operation makes more money by using less of the core ingredient, THC – which is expensive – and diluting it with oils that cost considerably less.

Public health authorities said some cutting agents might be the cause of the lung illnesses and had homed in on a particular one, vitamin E acetate, an oil that could cause breathing problems and lung inflammation if it does not heat up fully during the vaping aerosolisation process.

Medium-grade THC can cost $4,000 (£3,200) a kilo and higher-grade THC costs double that, but additives may cost pennies on the dollar, said Chip Paul, a longtime vaping entrepreneur in Oklahoma who led the state’s drive to legalise medical marijuana there.

“That’s what they’re doing, They’re cutting this oil,” he said of illegal operations. “If I can cut it in half,” he described the thinking, “I can double my money.”

The black market products come packaged looking as the THC vaping products that are legal in some states do. Sometimes the packages are direct counterfeits of mass-market brands sold in places like California or Colorado, where THC is legal, and others just look the part.

“Someone would not recognise that this is not a legitimate product,” said Dr Howard Zucker, commissioner of the New York State Department of Health, adding that this is a tremendous risk.

“The counterfeit handbag you buy on the corner is not going to kill you but the counterfeit vaping device you buy has a chance to kill you,” he said.

In Wisconsin, the neatly packaged vaping devices had logos such as Dabwoods, Chronic Sour Patch and Dank King Louie. Police say the Huffhines operation produced close to 3,000 cartridges a day; cartridges sell for around $35 (£28) to $40 (£32).

A lawyer for Tyler Huffhines declined to comment.

Wisconsin police say they were stunned by the scope and ambition of the Huffhines operation, and only beginning to understand how far it might have reached.

It was a teenager in nearby Waukesha whose actions eventually led police to the operation in Bristol, a town just miles from the Illinois border.

That teenager’s parents discovered that he was vaping and brought him to the police station in Waukesha. He then told police where he got his vaping supplies; authorities traced the sellers step by step, and several degrees of separation later, they were led to the Huffhines brothers.

The New York Times