Fake vape pens pose a health threat to NYC

In addition to New York's already beleagured legal weed roll out, its runaway illicit cannabis market and licensing process that seems to be moving at glacial speed throw a bunch of fake vapes into the works and now you have a possible public health crisis.

Mayor Eric Adams, along with DA Alvin Bragg and a list of city officials and lawmakers, gave a press conference on Tuesday in which they issued one of the strongest warnings to illict weed-selling smoke shops, including a threat to go after the landlords of the buildings they operate in.

It's one thing to buy or sell on NYC's grey market, especially considering the fact that the legal market is not yet established, but the invasion of fake vape pens poses a problem, maybe not new but an issue nonetheless.

A Bloomberg report found that counterfeit products range from generic weed in branded packaging to non-psychoactive hemp sprayed with delta-8, which the FDA has warned could be unsafe, something many people found out for themselves. Bloomberg noted that there are many counterfeit in-demand vape pens and products with falsified lab results and state certifications.

Ron Gershoni, CEO of California vape company Jetty Extracts, reported the recent discovery of a large number of imitation Jetty vape products in New York City.

Counterfeit vape products, which may be crafted with inferior materials, are known to raise health concerns.

The outbreak of e-cigarette or vaping product use-associated lung injury has caused great concern for the medical community, especially given that this novel illness has coincided with the COVID 19 pandemic, another cause of severe pulmonary illness, according to a study published by the National Institutes of Health.

Despite the recent deadly outbreak of EVALI, cannabis vaping has continued to proliferate and novel products are introduced at a daunting rate. Damian Fagon, chief equity officer at the Office of Cannabis Management in New York, noted how easy it is to create fake packaging by using good old photoshop and a label printer.

An estimated 1,400 illegal smoke shops and bodegas selling weed products have popped up around NYC since last summer, according to Mayor Adams and NY s cannabis authorities. There are only two legal retail shops in NYC, the entire state for that matter - Housing Works and Smacked, both of which opened in the past two months.

According to a survey, 71% of New Yorkers are under the impression that they were buying their cannabis on the legal recreational market in 2022 despite the fact that it only officially began functioning on December 29.

Consumer perception and industry standards don't always meld, said Maddie Scanlon, senior insights analyst at Brightfield Group, the cannabis industry data firm that conducted the survey. And you re like, Oh my god, they are thinking they are shopping recreationally? They just don't know. They're buying at smoke shops.

NY state should start a move on and set up the legal market.

One suggestion is: How can the existing medical marijuana dispensaries sell recreational cannabis - a system that was successfully undertaken by neighboring states like Connecticut and Rhode Island and will be done in Maryland when the state launches sales this coming July.