NPR.

Here is a riddle for you.

Can you think of a product that's illegal, but so widely available that you could probably get it at any local gas station or corner store.

I'll give you a second.

If you said marijuana, first of all, what kind of gas stations do you have in your neighborhood?

And second, the answer we are looking for is vapes. Also known as

e-cigarettes or e-vaporizers, each year, somewhere between $14 and $25 billion worth of these

pocket-sized nicotine delivery devices are sold in the U.S. And yet, according to the Altria Group, which has become one of the big

players in this space, more than 60% of vapes sold last year were illegal under federal law.

This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Adrian Ma. So how is this illegal market thriving

right now, right under the nose of regulators, and what's being

done about it? Today on the show, journalist Nick Florco joins us to explain. Nick writes for the

Atlantic, where he reports on the way's business and policy affect public health. And after the break,

he'll help us clear some of the haze around the business of vapes.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about one out of every five deaths in the U.S. each year are caused by cigarette smoking or secondhand smoke exposure.

So it makes sense that many health experts would consider nicotine vaping a less harmful habit than smoking.

But when I spoke with journalist Nick Florko recently on NPR's Weekend Edition, he said

vaping is definitely not without its risks. The reality is, I mean, when somebody's vaping,

they're taking in chemicals into their lungs. This is not something that we should be thinking

about lightly. And the companies that are actually authorized, you know, they're submitting this data to the FDA to make sure that their products aren't, you know, extremely dangerous. There aren't heavy metals leaching into these liquids, et cetera. And the products that are coming in from China are largely unregulated. We don't know how these products are being made. We don't know what is in them.

And a lot of the times they are being marketed to kids. I mean, we're seeing kid-friendly flavors.

We're even seeing, you know, vapes that have little video games on them now.

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