Members of a cartel kidnapped two employees of a vape shop in northern Mexico for several hours, blindfolded and tied them up, and demanded to speak with the owners. They wanted to tell them they were taking over the business. They would only be allowed to sell online, and even then, only outside of that state.
“They don’t come asking if you want it or not, they come telling you what’s about to happen,” explained one of the owners, a 27-year-old from the United States, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals.
This occurred in early 2022, when the sale of vapes and e-cigarettes, a business worth approximately $1.5 billion annually, was booming amid legal loopholes. Now the situation has worsened.
With the total ban on their sale—though not their consumption—going into effect this month, experts believe that organized crime will consolidate its control over these devices.
“By prohibiting it, you’re handing the market over to non-state actors” in a country with high levels of corruption and cartel-related violence, warned Zara Snapp, director of the RIA Institute, a Mexican organization that studies drug policy in Latin America.
Furthermore, given the increasing pressure from the United States on drug trafficking, the vaping market is becoming strategic, noted Alejandro Rosario, a lawyer who represents retailers in the sector. It provides money to the cartels to finance other crimes, but has “little visibility” to U.S. authorities because it is legal there.
Vaping is permitted and regulated in different ways in the United States and Europe, but it is prohibited in at least eight Latin American countries. Some nations, such as Japan, have used it to reduce smoking, but restrictions on its use have increased in recent years, spurred by warnings from the World Health Organization.
During the administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-2024), a staunch critic of vaping, Mexico began issuing health alerts following poisonings in the United States. The president banned its importation by decree in 2021 and its sale by mid-2022.
When the Supreme Court ruled the ban unconstitutional, López Obrador did not reverse course but instead opted to amend the Constitution.
This reform was finalized in January 2025, with his successor Claudia Sheinbaum already in office, and included vaping devices in the same paragraph as fentanyl. Many lawyers considered this disproportionate because both the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and most scientists agree that, based on available evidence, e-cigarettes are far less dangerous than traditional cigarettes.
But vapes continued to enter Mexico from China—the main manufacturer—or the United States and were sold in legal establishments or on websites thanks to the lack of secondary laws enforcing the ban.
Authorities took action, and in one of their largest seizures, they confiscated 130,000 vapes at the port of Lázaro Cárdenas on the Pacific coast.
In Mexico City, Aldo Martínez, a shop owner, was fined the equivalent of $38,000 for selling them, although he appealed the fine and ultimately avoided paying it.
The situation changed with the passage last December of the law that prohibits everything related to vaping—sale, import, distribution, and manufacture—and establishes penalties of up to eight years in prison. Martínez immediately stopped selling the devices, even though they represented two-thirds of his income. He and his friends would consume his remaining stock. “I don’t want to go to jail,” he said.
However, he fears that authorities will come to his shop and plant vaping devices on him in order to extort him, a sadly common practice among Mexican police.
Many civil organizations are warning about this type of corruption, which can also occur if someone is found with multiple vaping devices, since the law doesn’t specify how many can be possessed for personal use.
“If I create an imprecise law… I give corrupt authorities ammunition to interpret it in a way that allows them to extort people,” said Juan José Cirión Lee, a lawyer and president of the Mexico and the World Vaping collective. He is already preparing legal challenges to fight the new regulations, which he says are full of ambiguities and contradictions.
Source: abc7
