Well the news is that they worked out why there have been a spate of vaping illnesses / deaths. Turns out that cannibis oil used in bootleg vapes was being cut with a variety of substances, and you could tell it was cut by seeing how viscous it was: the cut oil would be lighter
but then this guy found a substance to cut it with that had the right viscosity and color: vitamin e acetate, and marketed it as Honey Cut, making a whole lot of money selling to the underground THC vape cartridge market, effectively as a way to dupe the customers as to the potency of the product.
The only problem being that if you look at the Material Safety Data Sheets for vitamin e acetate it says not to inhale the stuff. They used vitamin e acetate to get around another company's patents, but apparently never bothered to check out any medical information about what they were selling, until after the deaths started, at which point Honey Cut's company quickly changed their LLC address to a post office box and can no longer be contacted.
We can pretty much say at this point that all the illnesses that started happening in early 2019 and the roughly 39 deaths are all due to that one guy who started Honey Cut. His name's Joshua Temple btw and expect to be hearing more about it. Even with the deaths they're saying that they can't 'technically' charge him, because of the stupid American laws about "supplements" being completely unregulated. Seriously.
Apparently articles say they're not considering banning the actual poison used in the Honey Cut mix - that's still legal even though it kills people, because it was classed a "supplement" and there are too many people making too much money off that for them to let the FDA start regulating things. But they did ban flavored vapes. Think of the children! Flavors bad, poison good. This is sort of the American Way though isn't it? Ban something young people like that's remotely connected while leaving the actual thing that killed people as legal.