The thing causing this outbreak seems to have been someone using a vitamin e oil to increase the potency of their thx carts up to 95% or so. [0] I also believe they were out of Chicago. Or at least they shipped a lot of carts to Chicago/Illinois and then they spread out from there. But this is just from the cases I've read. Also from today Doctors have identified previously unrecognized characteristic of the vaping-r…
“The reason [vitamin e is] being found in black market carts is because black market manufacturers are incentivized to dilute out their product as much as possible to maximize profit. They don't have to provide you with potency numbers, they just need the cartridge to look plausibly full of distillate.
This means they use any of the aforementioned dilution methods, or even other less safe methods and wind up with a thing and runny product that is obviously not high purity distillate.
So what do they do? They thicken it back up to be more believable. This is where Vitamin E acetate comes in. It can reliably dissolve a large range of organic compounds but is also similarly viscous to Maple syrup. This means it can be used to dilute distillate or thicken up heavily cut distillate, but leave it looking comparable to an actual high quality distillate. Thus they can turn a 1g cart into 5 1g carts, for the low low price of the health of the end user.”
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/FLMedicalTrees/comments/d0wn7v/clea...