The New Unregulated Loophole Chinese Vape Makers Are Exploiting in the U.S.

Earlier this year, I developed a pretty harmful habit: vaping. To be more specific, I started using flavored vapes manufactured in China’s well-known “Vape Valley” that are distributed widely across the United States.

Flavored nicotine vapes are largely illegal across the U.S., yet convenience stores and tobacco retailers nationwide have generated billions of dollars in sales from these products in recent years. This trade has persisted despite periodic law enforcement seizures and ongoing efforts by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to keep these goods off the market.

More recently, Chinese vape manufacturers have found a new workaround to dodge U.S. law, escaping all regulatory oversight entirely. Like most consumers, I once assumed the only addictive chemical in these products was synthetic nicotine, which vape brands have used for decades to avoid FDA scrutiny. But after Congress closed that loophole in 2022, expanding regulatory scope to cover nicotine beyond tobacco-derived variants, Chinese manufacturers began filling their vapes with understudied nicotine-mimicking compounds known as nicotine analogs.

Because current U.S. regulations still use an overly narrow definition of what counts as nicotine, Chinese companies can sell nicotine analog vapes in the U.S. without meeting standard federal tobacco requirements. These rules generally mandate that brands submit new products for FDA scientific review before they can be legally marketed, a step nicotine analog makers skip entirely.

“This is just like whack-a-mole, these companies will do everything they can to circumvent regulation,” says Robert Jackler, an emeritus professor of head and neck surgery at Stanford University and founder of an interdisciplinary research group studying the impacts of tobacco advertising.

The effects of nicotine analogs on human health have not been extensively researched, but animal studies have found that one of the most common variants, 6-methyl-nicotine, could be more potent and addictive than regular nicotine. Vapes containing nicotine analogs may also expose users to a host of other unmarked, unknown chemicals. A 2024 study found that some manufacturers sell nicotine analog vapes that include extra unlabeled ingredients, including artificial sweeteners and cooling agents with unknown risks when inhaled.

“What's on the label has very little relationship to what's in it,” says Jackler.

Researchers first documented the emergence of vapes containing 6-methyl-nicotine and other nicotine analogs in the U.S. market around three years ago. But the chemical compounds themselves are nothing new — tobacco companies have researched them as far back as the 1970s. A 2005 review of millions of previously confidential internal industry documents found big tobacco had long explored nicotine-like compounds as nicotine replacements, in part because they believed the compounds could help them avoid future regulation.

U.S. tobacco companies never ended up bringing mainstream products containing these nicotine-like chemicals to market, however. Instead, the compounds surfaced decades later in disposable vapes made by Chinese manufacturers, which have proven extremely skilled at finding new ways to keep selling their products in the United States.

Chinese vape companies “are extremely creative, they are extremely 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 Law Enforcement Network, an advocacy group that does not publicly disclose its funding.

“The Chinese have been flooding the American market with illegal vape products designed to target children for years. These fake nicotine products appear to be a new scheme to trick American consumers into putting illicit, potentially dangerous chemicals into their body,” Tim Sheehy, a Republican 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 continue to sound the alarm on this problem.”

But Jackler notes that the Trump administration has effectively dismantled the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention office responsible for the agency’s tobacco prevention programs and significantly cut the size of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products. That means most of the work to regulate nicotine analogs has fallen to individual 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. There is still no comprehensive federal law that regulates these substances the same way as tobacco-derived or synthetic nicotine.

That could change soon. The Trump administration's proposed budget for fiscal year 2027 includes a legislative proposal that would expand the legal definition of nicotine to include nicotine analogs, allowing them to be regulated by the FDA the same way as traditional cigarettes. The proposal notes that the compounds “can be more potent, addictive, and cytotoxic than nicotine.”

If enacted, the change would close the loophole that Chinese vape manufacturers have been exploiting, but it would also allow major U.S. tobacco companies to potentially legally develop and sell their own nicotine analog products, provided they comply with the FDA's regulatory requirements.

“What we're seeing the administration do is to adopt the agenda of the major US tobacco companies,” says Jackler. In theory, that includes protecting Americans from unregulated products from China, “but really, what it is about is the large tobacco companies are saying, ‘damn we are losing business to these Chinese startups.’”

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This is an installment of Made in China, the newsletter by Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis. Read previous editions here.