ok here's a quick history...

nicotene vape has been around for a while... but THC vape carts are rather new by comparison.

when THC carts got big, they first started in states where med and rec THC was legal. once they got popular there were people all over the country making "black market" carts by ordering knockoff packaging from china. essentially the same factories making the carts and packaging for the rec carts in cali and CO would sell them to anyone, 100 at a time, on alibaba and dhgate.

you could buy 100, 500, 1000, 10,000... whatever you want. mixed packs of the same brand.

when they first started there were king carts, exotics, cereal, mario's, danks, and later brass knuckles and cookies...

these were all readily sold online with any packaging you wanted printed with flavors and fake %ages...

you'd get flat pack boxes, sheets of stickers to seal the end product, and flats of empty ccell carts that you could fill with whatever you wanted.

when you're all done they looked like they came right off the shelf at a store.

day 1 they were selling for 40-50 bucks, then the market got flooded with them, mostly because of those two brothers from wisconsin that got busted, but anyway the price started to drop until it leveled out around 20 bucks a cart.

at that point, if you know what you're talking about you know there's no damn way you can fill a cart with concentrate for 20 bucks... you'd be losing money.

the price got so low because people were mixing in all sorts of whatever the fuck they wanted... some of them even had fentanyl in them.

then the liquid vitamin E started getting sold... and all hell broke loose. people started getting sick... not just the stories on the news... those kids must have been smoking a BUNCH of that shit to get serious side effects. we had bad carts circulate in our area around that time... you could taste it... it just tasted off. people were getting high but they were getting massive headaches and they got horrible coughs from it... coughing up all sorts of fluid.

it was like a dry cough... that wouldn't produce anything... until like cough number 15 when you got a whole mouth full of lung fluid and you could spit it out. (it was the oil).

everyone i know stopped buying carts when that shit hit because you couldn't trust any of them.

people in the know were warning everyone when the price dropped that low but nobody wanted to listen... they just figured less money is better than "getting ripped off".

luckily, the quality carts started replacing the cheap ones once people understood the difference between cost and quality.

i only smoke carts i make myself, or someone i trust does.... or carts i buy at the state rec store. now that rec is more common and people have all built supply networks they can trust... the cheap carts have mostly vanished.

besides these days it's so easy to go online and learn how to make them yourself... all you need is a hot plate, a syringe, some terps ("flavor") and some concentrate... depending on what level of viscosity you started with (the purity of the concentrate) you then need to add some form of liquidizer into them to get the viscosity right so it flows right in the tanks... otherwise you don't get a hit.