Mexico has amended its constitution to ban the sale of electronic cigarettes and vapes. The move has led to legal sales plummeting as vendors close up shop, leaving the $1.5 billion industry in the hands of the country’s infamous cartels. A lack of clear legislation is enabling criminal organizations to strong-arm their way into the industry.
Ban leads to organized crime takeover
In 2022, former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, an “outspoken critic of vaping,” banned the import and sale of e-cigarettes, said The Associated Press. When Mexico’s Supreme Court declared the ban unconstitutional, López Obrador pushed for a constitutional amendment, which passed in January 2025 under his successor, President Claudia Sheinbaum.
The move put e-cigarettes and vapes on the same level with fentanyl, “something many lawyers see as totally out of proportion.” However, the “lack of a law to implement the ban left a loophole,” and vapes continued entering the country from China and the United States. In December, the legal loophole was closed by a new law that “prohibits virtually everything about vapes except consumption, imposing fines and prison sentences of up to eight years.”
In the vacuum left by the end of the legal vape industry, an “illicit market for vapes and tobacco” has become one of the most “dynamic sources of financing for organized crime,” said Forbes Mexico. Seven cartels are currently vying for control of the market in the country, according to a report, “Smoke, vaping and power: the new business of organized crime,” compiled by civil organizations and Mexican journalist Oscar Balderas.
At least seven organizations — CJNG, Sinaloa Cartel, Nueva Familia Michoacana, Gulf Cartel, Northeast Cartel, United Cartels and La Unión Tepito — have turned the illicit nicotine products into a strategic “slush fund,” the report said. The market “finances weapons, criminal logistics and clashes in at least 16 high-risk states,” Balderas said.
A ‘vague legal cloud’
By banning vapes, the government is “handing the market to non-state groups” in a country with high levels of corruption and violence tied to the cartels, Zara Snapp, the director of the Mexico-based Instituto RIA, which studies drug policy in Latin America, said to the Associated Press. The ban could also strengthen the cartels by giving them “another revenue stream that is not a high priority for the United States government because vapes are still legal there,” Alejandro Rosario, a lawyer representing vape shops, said, according to the AP.
The ban was “sold as a win for public health,” but months after it was enforced, “nothing works,” said the Latin American Post. No “enforcement guidelines,” “criminal statutes” or “defined penalties.” Just a “vague legal cloud.”
Mexico passed the constitutional amendment but “failed to write the rulebook,” Julia Anguiano, the research director at Instituto RIA, said to the Latin American Post. “Now we’re living in a dangerous vacuum.” The law “benefits no one — not the users, not public health, not even law enforcement.” Instituto RIA has spent years analyzing international data on vaping, urging Congress to “regulate, not prohibit,” said the Post.
Instead, Mexico “lumped vapes into the same legislative conversation as illicit fentanyl,” stirring “public fear and equating fruity nicotine pods with deadly opioids.” They “rode the fentanyl panic to push a nicotine ban,” Anguiano said. It was a “political calculus, not a public health decision.”
Cartels have expanded their power over the sale of illicit tobacco