There's been an absolutely massive disinformation campaign against vaping in the US. This is because states make a fuck ton of money on tobacco sales, and they often spend their projected earnings ahead of time.

Vaping was starting to make an impact, so they started panicking. A bunch of states tried to add a tax on eliquid, but the rates were always so ludicrous that they got shut down.

Then the FDA got the power to regulate tobacco products. Suddenly, everything related to vaping, including metal wire and batteries, were tobacco products.

They created the Pre-Market Tobacco Application process which required vaping manufacturers to submit every single SKU they had, at a cost of $250k-2m each. This meant that if you had one flavor in 0mg, 3mg, 6mg, and 12mg nicotine strengths, you had to submit 4 separate applications.

This effectively killed an industry run by small businesses who went out of their way to make sure their products were produced safely. Many had their own ISO clean rooms for manufacturing e-liquid. And the open hardware market that let you use refillable tanks.

That's the reason sketchy disposables flooded the market. The legit businesses closed their doors, but the dispo manufacturers knew the FDA wasn't going to go after every gas station.