DEA warns about nearly undetectable drugs in vape cartridges
(KUTV) — Drug agents in Utah say they are seeing an increase in the prevalence of illicit drugs being distributed in vape pen cartridges.
Three people are currently facing federal charges for allegedly distributing thousands of THC-filled cartridges in Ohio.
DEA District Agent in Charge Brian Besser says law enforcement officers in Utah are concerned about the trend of drug use in vape cartridges spreading here.
“It’s really becoming an anonymous way to abuse these drugs,” Besser told 2News.
Besser says DEA agents have seen drug cartels beginning to put liquefied drugs in vape cartridges.
“They’ve all of a sudden gotten involved in this vape cartridge industry, and reasonably so, because they know they are going to make money off of it,” he said.
Healthcare providers are also concerned about the trend.
Last fall, a teen was hospitalized after smoking highly-concentrated THC from a vape pen.
“A lot of these illicit drugs, when they’re put in these vaporizers, they can be in public, they can be at home with your kids and not realizing it” said Jeremy Bair, a pharmacist at Intermountain Medical Center’s emergency department.
Bair says he is tasked with keeping up on new drug trends, and he has seen cases of people overdosing on a variety of drugs that were smoked through vape cartridges, including, spice, meth, opiates, and flaca.
“You can have effects such as paranoia, agitation, delirium, a lot of things that go along with ingesting those sort of illicit drugs,” Bair said.
Besser says overdose data that is reported to the DEA does not always contain the method of ingestion, so it’s hard to track how many overdose cases have come from drug-filled vape cartridges.
In liquid form, the drugs can be hard to detect because of scented vape juices. Besser describes them as nearly "undetectable," adding that users may not know what they are inhaling.
“Once they start putting Fentanyl in the vape oils, we’re going to start seeing a lot of kids die,” Besser said.
