Chinese companies sell e-cigarettes that contain chemicals potentially stronger than nicotine

Earlier this year, I’ve picked up a rather unfortunate habit: vaping. More specifically, I started smoking flavored e-cigarettes manufactured in the so-called “vape valley” of China and sold throughout the United States.

Nicotine-flavored e-cigarettes are largely illegal in the United States, yet convenience stores and tobacco shops across the country have generated billions of dollars in sales of these products in recent years, despite periodic law enforcement seizures and efforts by the Food and Drug Administration to keep them off the market. Recently, Chinese manufacturers have found a new way to circumvent the law and escape regulatory oversight altogether.

Like many people, I assumed that the only addictive chemical in these products was synthetic nicotine, which e-cigarette manufacturers have used for years to avoid FDA oversight. But after Congress closed that loophole in 2022 — and expanded regulation to include tobacco-derived nicotine — Chinese manufacturers began filling e-cigarettes with little-studied chemicals that mimic the effects of nicotine, known as nicotine analogues.

Because current regulations still narrowly define what constitutes nicotine, Chinese companies have been able to sell nicotine analogue e-cigarettes in the United States without having to worry about federal tobacco rules, which generally require companies to submit new products to the Food and Drug Administration for scientific review before they can be legally marketed.

“It’s kind of like whack-a-mole, where these companies will do whatever they can to circumvent regulation,” says Robert Jackler, professor emeritus of head and neck surgery at Stanford University and founder of an interdisciplinary research group studying the effects of tobacco advertising.

The effects of nicotine analogues on humans have not been extensively researched, but animal studies have found that one of the most common variants, 6-methyl-nicotine, can be more powerful and addictive than regular nicotine. E-cigarettes containing nicotine analogues may also expose users to other mysterious chemicals. One 2024 study found that some manufacturers were selling analog nicotine products that contained additional undeclared ingredients, including artificial sweeteners and cooling agents with unknown inhalation risks. “What’s written on the label has nothing to do with what’s in it,” Jackler says.

Researchers first documented the appearance of e-cigarettes containing 6-methylnicotine and other nicotine analogues on the U.S. market about three years ago. But the chemical compounds themselves are not new; tobacco companies have been researching them since the 1970s.

A 2005 review of millions of previously secret internal industry documents found that big tobacco companies had long explored nicotine-like compounds as nicotine replacements, in part because they believed they could help circumvent potential regulation.

But American tobacco companies never finished marketing mainstream products containing any of these nicotine-like chemicals. Instead, they emerged decades later in disposable e-cigarettes made by Chinese manufacturers, which have proven adept at finding new ways to continue selling their products in the United States.

Chinese e-cigarette companies are “very creative, very smart,” says Rich Marianos, a former official with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who is now executive director of the Tobacco Enforcement Network, an advocacy group that does not publicly disclose its funding.

“The Chinese have been flooding the American market with illegal e-cigarette products designed to target children for years. These counterfeit nicotine products appear to be a new scheme to trick American consumers into putting illicit and potentially dangerous chemicals into their bodies,” Tim Sheehy, Republican state senator from Montana, said in a statement to WIRED. “The Trump administration has made cracking down on these unregulated Chinese products a priority, and I hope they will continue to sound the alarm on this issue.”

But Geckler points out that the Trump administration has effectively dismantled the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention office responsible for the agency’s tobacco prevention programs and dramatically reduced the size of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products. This means that much of the effort to regulate nicotine analogues has fallen to the United States. Jackler says he is aware of four states — California, Nebraska, Indiana and Tennessee — that have expanded their definitions of tobacco products to explicitly include nicotine-like chemicals. But there is still no comprehensive federal law that treats these substances in the same way as nicotine derived from tobacco or synthetic nicotine.