The customs administration in neighboring Croatia seized 970 disposable e-cigarettes that minors had ordered online. They arrived from China and from illegal warehouses in the European Union - some for personal use, others for resale. The story is Croatian only on paper; those same vapes, from those same warehouses, reach children in Skopje too. Borders don't exist for them.

Doctors are warning about a growing number of children who end up in the emergency room because of these devices. In a single May, five children ended up in emergency admission at one Zagreb hospital. "We certainly have more and more patients because of vapes, and lately more and more poisonings from products advertised as THC vapes," said an emergency medicine specialist. The patients are mostly high schoolers aged 15 to 17, with chest pain, vomiting, loss of consciousness, and states resembling epileptic seizures.

"Devices like these are not harmless, and that is exactly why their use is banned for people under 18," warned a representative of the public health institute. Customs imposed fines of 4,350 euros, filed four proposals to the juvenile court, and issued seven misdemeanor orders. In the past year around 50,000 e-cigarettes have been seized there - and that's only what got caught.

And now the real question, the one no one behind the counters wants to ask out loud: if our neighbors seize tens of thousands of vapes and their children end up in the ER, what are our customs, our health system, our schools doing? The same product, the same age, the same danger - only without any numbers anyone is counting. When the problem is shared but only one side of the border reacts, the children pay the difference.