Children as young as 13 have been hospitalised after using vapes spiked with dangerous drugs like spice and fentanyl.
ITV News analysis of official police data reveals vape spiking is a new emerging threat.
One teenage girl from Teesside collapsed at school after trying a reusable vape containing the zombie drug spice while she was in a classroom.
“It was scary,” she said. “The teacher was talking to me but I was throwing up and passing out.”
‘Polly’, 13, whose identity we are protecting due to her young age, told ITV News she had been left traumatised by the “near death” experience in December.
“When I was in the ambulance, the lady said to me, ‘Don’t close your eyes in case you don’t wake back up’. I kept looking at her, but everything kept going weird.”
Spice is a synthetic substance known as the zombie drug because in extreme cases it can cause breathing difficulties, psychosis and muscle spasms. The class B drug is also highly addictive.
The teenager was rushed to hospital where doctors later told her mother Deborah that if her daughter had taken “one more puff” she could have had a heart attack.
“They said ‘If she’d have had a little more, she could have had a cardiac arrest’, which made me even more scared,” she told ITV News. “It was very frightening. I thought I was going to lose her.”
Dealers are using social media sites like Snapchat and TikTok to target children who are bombarded with posts advertising brightly coloured vapes in a range of exotic flavours.
Police have warned some vaping liquids that are advertised online as containing cannabis oil are being replaced with spice because it’s cheaper. Many children have no idea what they are inhaling.
Freedom of Information requests submitted by ITV News to police forces across England and Wales reveal a surge in vape spiking or poisoning incidents over the last five years.
Children as young as 13 have had their vapes spiked with suspected class A and B drugs such as spice, fentanyl, cocaine, amphetamines and acid.
Hundreds of incidents have occurred at schools, on trains and in hospitality venues, most often with reusable vapes.
Last year, one girl aged 14 had her vape spiked with suspected GHB, known as a date rape drug.
A separate Teacher Tapp survey of 4,500 secondary school teachers for ITV News found nearly one in ten teachers in England had confiscated an illegal vape in the last 12 months.
“It’s incredibly dangerous for young people to be using vapes, and these illegal vapes pose a real risk not only to the children using them, but everyone who comes in contact with them,” said Grainne Hallahan from Teacher Tapp.
Headteacher Glyn Potts told ITV News the issue is “incredibly concerning”
Across England, headteachers have voiced their fears that vape spiking could lead to a fatality at school unless urgent action is taken at government level.
At Newman RC College near Oldham, a child collapsed at the school gates after inhaling a vape spiked with an unknown drug.
Headteacher Glyn Potts told ITV News: “I’m incredibly concerned because we just don’t know what these young people are ingesting, but we do know there are criminal gangs who are putting things in the vapes that are causing real damage.
“The government needs to step in and assist schools in being able to contain these devices, some of which are so poorly made they can cause a fire by exploding, so we can get them to laboratories and we can work out where the criminals are.
“Until we tackle that, forgive me, but I think we are in a period of time when we are praying there isn’t a tragedy.”
The Manchester Drug Analysis and Knowledge Exchange, known as the MANDRAKE Lab, was created at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2016 to help police forces tackle an “epidemic of psychoactive substances” in the city.
Dr Oliver Sutcliffe is part of a team set up to reduce the harm of illicit drugs
A team of scientists led by Dr Oliver Sutcliffe now test vapes confiscated from schoolchildren across the north of England.
“You can’t distinguish visually through taste or smell if the liquid is tobacco or something more dangerous like spice,” he told ITV News.
“Some of our results have come back with a 98% match with a common spice. A really potent sample. It can actually cause catatonic states and suppress breathing.”
With results available in as little as two hours, the team works with police and the NHS to issue public health alerts.
NHS figures show a quarter of 11 to 15-year-olds have tried vaping and some become addicted at a young age.
In Liverpool, the first vaping cessation clinic aimed at children saw its first patients in January 2025 at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital.
Consultant at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, Professor Rachel Isba told ITV News there are “so many unknowns” with vaping
Professor Rachel Isba, a consultant in paediatric public health medicine, said her team work closely with each young person to explore their level of nicotine dependency, but she also warned that it was often impossible to know what children were inhaling.
“There is just such a wide variety of vapes available, some have other substances in deliberately, some have other substances in accidentally,” she said.
“A few years ago in the US, there was a batch of contaminated vapes that had a particular vitamin in and there were quite a lot of deaths in adults because this was something that if you exposed your lungs to, it was very damaging and people died as a result.
“My worry is something like that could creep into the vape supply here. There just so many unknowns,” Prof Isba said.
In response to our investigation, a government spokesperson said: “Selling vapes laced with spice or other drugs is dangerous and illegal, and anyone caught doing so should feel the full force of the law.
“Border Force can seize suspected spiked vapes and we are cracking down on rogue retailers, keeping dangerous vapes out of children’s hands.”
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