Mexico’s sweeping crackdown on electronic cigarettes is accelerating a shift in the country’s $1.5-billion vape-pen market toward organized crime, according to ABC News.

The country formally imposed a ban on the import and sale of the pens on January 16 following a legal battle that saw former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s administration successfully push for new legislation and win a constitutional amendment to codify the prohibition, the news agency said. While the use of vapes remains legal, the sale of vape products is punishable with fines and prison sentences of up to eight years. 

The embargo has hastened the increasing role cartels play in selling contraband vapes across Mexico’s northern states and major cities, including Guadalajara and Mexico City, sources told ABC News. In some cases, criminal groups are even using stamps and stickers to identify a cartel-owned “brand,” in the manner seen with trafficked fentanyl pills.

To tighten their grip on the market, criminal syndicates have resorted to intimidation, extortion, and violence against sellers in Sonora and other states, according to Alejandro Rosario, a lawyer representing vape-shop owners who spoke to ABC News. Some retailers, he said, have opted to sell cartel-owned vapes in exchange for protection from authorities. 

“By banning it, you’re handing the market to non-state groups” in a country with high levels of corruption and violence tied to cartels, Zara Snapp, director of the Mexico-based Ría Institute, told the news outlet. 

A longtime vape seller in Mexico City told ABC News that some customers had been threatened for buying vapes online, and that one of his suppliers sold inventory to organized crime groups.

Cartels are already presenting themselves as suppliers and “formal businesses,” including by purchasing disposable shells directly from Asian manufacturers and filling them themselves, Rosario told the news agency. 

A report by the Mexican nongovernmental organization Defensorxs found that the Jalisco New Generation Cartel has “businesses dedicated to repackaging Asian vapes,” and that other criminal organizations, including the Sinaloa cartel, operate in the vape black market, ABC News said. 

Read more at ABC News