Vape makers are especially vulnerable to the tariffs. Nicolas Guarino, co-founder and chief executive of Jaunty, which makes the state’s top-selling brand of cannabis vapes, said that the cost of hardware for a single vape had climbed 22 percent, to $5. The company’s next quarterly hardware order totaled about $240,000, compared with $200,000 without the tariffs, he added.
Peter Machalek, the chief revenue officer at Green Tank Technologies, a manufacturer in Toronto that supplies Jaunty’s vape hardware, said the devices were made in China from 16 to 20 components, including the battery, the oil reservoir, the plastic mouthpiece and the ceramic atomizer. Machalek said that even if manufacturers switched to countries like Malaysia that the new tariffs do not cover, some of the components would still need to come from China. “There’s no escaping it,” he said.
Guarino said the tariffs hurt businesses that play by the rules, extending the advantage that the illicit market already has. The tariffs put pressure on vape makers to switch to lower-quality hardware and to cut corners with testing, which could compromise consumer safety, he said.
“Generally, the impact is going to be lesser-quality products for consumers because the high-quality supply chains that are established have become too expensive, and people want the price to come down,” he said. The result, he added, is that consumers who use vapes may end up inhaling toxic amounts of heavy metals like cadmium and mercury.
The cannabis industry is also concerned about what the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration will mean for cannabis farms and foreign investors. Federal immigration agents visited Hepworth Farms last week and served the owners with a subpoena for payroll records. Gail Hepworth, who runs the 207-year-old farm with her twin sister, Amy, said they decided to turn over the records after meeting with their undocumented workers.