At the beginning of this year, I picked up a rather unfortunate habit: vaping. More specifically, I started smoking flavored vaporizers made in the so-called “Vape Valley” of China and sold throughout the United States.

Flavored nicotine vaporizers are largely illegal in the United States, yet convenience stores and tobacconists across the country have generated billions of dollars in sales of these products in recent years, despite periodic seizures by authorities and efforts by the Food and Drug Administration to keep them off the market. More recently, Chinese manufacturers have found a new way to circumvent the law, escaping regulatory oversight entirely.

Like many people, I assumed the only addictive chemical in these products was synthetic nicotine, which vaporizer manufacturers have used for years to avoid FDA oversight. But after Congress closed that loophole in 2022 (expanding regulation beyond tobacco-derived nicotine), Chinese manufacturers began filling their vaporizers with little-studied chemicals that mimic the effects of nicotine, known as nicotine analogues.

Because current regulations still narrowly define what is considered nicotine, Chinese companies have been able to sell nicotine analog vaporizers in the U.S. without having to worry about federal tobacco regulations, which generally require companies to submit new products to the FDA for scientific review before they can be legally marketed.

“This is like whacking a mole: These companies will do everything 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 that studies the impacts of tobacco advertising.

The effects of nicotine analogs in humans have not been extensively researched, but animal studies have found that one of the most popular variants, 6-methylnicotine, may be more potent and addictive than regular nicotine. Vaporizers containing nicotine analogues can also expose users to other mystery chemicals. A 2024 study found that some manufacturers sold nicotine analog vaporizers that contained additional unlabeled ingredients, including artificial sweeteners and cooling agents with unknown inhalation risks. “What’s on the label has very little relationship to what’s on it,” Jackler says.

Researchers first documented the appearance of vaporizers containing 6-methyl-nicotine and other nicotine analogues on the U.S. market about three years ago. But the chemicals themselves are nothing 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 had long explored nicotine-like compounds as nicotine substitutes, in part because they believed they could help evade potential regulation.

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

Chinese vaping companies “are extremely creative, they are extremely smart,” says Rich Marianos, a former U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives official 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 vaping products designed for children for years. These fake 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 senator from Montana, said in a statement to WIRED. “The Trump administration has made fighting these unregulated Chinese products a priority, and I hope they will continue to sound the alarm on this issue.”

But Jeckler 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 significantly reduced the size of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products. That means much of the effort to regulate nicotine analogues has fallen to the states. Jackler says he knows 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 the same as synthetic or tobacco-derived nicotine.