Hawaii’s Hemp Crackdown Tests Federal Law After Supreme Court Rebukes Anne Lopez
Congress legalized hemp in 2018. Hawaii rewrote the rules, criminalized federally compliant products, and now the same attorney general just rebuked by the Supreme Court is defending another state law
Hawaii Decided Federal Law Is Optional. Guess Who Pays.
In 2018, Congress legalized hemp. Defined it chemically — 0.3% delta-9 THC — signed it into law, made it legal in all fifty states. Hawaii read that statute and substituted its own chemistry, declared products Congress legalized to be contraband, and on June 23 announced it would enforce that against businesses like mine.
Maybe you don’t care about hemp. That’s understandable. Hell, you may even oppose it ardently. That, too, is acceptable—we live in a free country, after all. But states picking and choosing which federal laws they deem worth following is not remotely okay. In fact, it is a disastrous experiment America has seen before, the results of which fill the most shameful pages in the national scrapbook!
In 1832, the Supreme Court told Georgia its laws had no force in Cherokee territory. Georgia ignored the ruling, nobody made it comply, and the price was the Trail of Tears — roughly four thousand men, women, and children dead on a forced march. That's state nullification at full scale. Nobody loses a court case. They lose everything.
After Brown v. Board, Prince Edward County, Virginia chose to shut down its entire public school system rather than integrate — and kept it shut for five years. White kids got vouchers to private academies. Black kids got nothing. And in 1957, Arkansas deployed armed National Guard troops to block nine Black teenagers from a high school; it took the 101st Airborne to walk children past a mob. If you think that era ended, ask Alabama — which in 2023 openly refused a direct Supreme Court order to redraw its congressional map, until a federal court took the pen away.
Now here's where Hawaii enters the story — because ten days ago, the Supreme Court of the United States told you everything you need to know about how this state treats federal law.
In 2024, the Hawaii Supreme Court dismissed binding Second Amendment precedent with the line that "the spirit of Aloha clashes with a federally mandated lifestyle that lets citizens walk around with deadly weapons" — citing the HBO drama The Wire as authority. Hawaii then kept enforcing a law making it a crime for licensed permit holders to carry onto any private property open to the public without express permission.
On June 25, in Wolford v. Lopez, the Supreme Court struck that law down, 6-3, as a violation of the Second Amendment. And the majority went out of its way to answer the Aloha line directly: the Second Amendment cannot yield to the spirit of Aloha any more than it yielded to the spirit of the Big Apple or the Windy City — it applies the same way in the fiftieth state as in the other forty-nine. Worse: among the historical laws Hawaii offered to justify itself was a statute from Louisiana's Black Code — and the Court said that tainted artifact "cannot be taken seriously" as evidence of what the right to bear arms means. To defend defying the Constitution, this state reached for the legal machinery of racial oppression. That happened. Not even two damn weeks ago.
As if this weren’t shocking enough, pay attention to the case caption. Wolford v. Lopez. As in Anne Lopez — Hawaii's Attorney General. The same shameless, inconsistent, and wretched Anne Lopez named in my case. On June 25 the Supreme Court dismantled her defense of one state law defying federal law. On July 2 — seven days later — her office stood in federal court in Honolulu defending another one. Different case, same blatant lack of respect or regard for federal. God willing, the same outcome for both!
Yet the hypocrisy runs even deeper! While Hawaii criminalizes hemp — which Congress legalized — the same state licenses eight dispensaries selling marijuana, which remains federally illegal. It bans what Congress permitted and blesses what Congress prohibited. No theory of federalism explains both moves. Only one thing does: the state protects the businesses it has chosen and destroys the ones it hasn't. In Honolulu, federal law isn't a rulebook. It's a costume — worn when useful, dropped when not.
History teaches one last thing. Nullification never costs the officials who order it. Orval Faubus, the Arkansas governor who sent armed troops to keep nine Black children out of a public high school in open defiance of federal court orders, was never punished for it. His voters in fact nauseatingly rewarded him with six terms. The officials of Prince Edward County, Virginia who padlocked every public school in their county for five years rather than obey federal desegregation law died comfortably in their beds, never held to account for the generation of children they left without an education.
And Hawaii just lost at the Supreme Court, yet every official who built that unconstitutional law collected a paycheck the next morning, including Anne Lopez! That is the constant across two centuries of states defying federal law: the bill never lands on the government. It lands on the governed — the kids locked out of their schools, the families forced down the road, the permit holder made a criminal, the shopkeeper with empty shelves.
Lance Alyas
Oahu Dispensary and Provisions