How HPD Seizures Broke Our Hemp Supply Chain — And How Oahu Dispensary and Provisions Fought Back

A Honolulu small business explains how HPD’s unlawful seizures forced us to overhaul our hemp supply chain and join the USPS Hemp Whitelist Program to protect compliant shipments across Hawaii.

By Lance Alyas, Founder of Oahu Dispensary and Provisions — Honolulu, Hawaii’s leading hemp retailer

There’s a moment of truth for every business—a test that defines its character far more than any mission statement or marketing slogan ever could. For us at Oahu Dispensary and Provisions in Honolulu, Hawaii, that moment didn’t come from a competitor, a lawsuit, or a compliance officer. It came from something far more unsettling: the sudden breakdown of our supply chain at the hands of the very institutions meant to serve the public.

Without warning, we learned that the Honolulu Police Department (HPD) had instructed UPS and FedEx to seize any and all packages addressed to our business. Not inspect—seize. Tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of packages containing federally compliant hemp products, accompanied by verified certificates of analysis, sourced from legitimate licensed vendors across the United States, were intercepted and held without explanation. Overnight, an entire logistical system we had relied on collapsed—jeopardizing the operation of our CBD and hemp retail locations across Oahu.

This wasn’t just an inconvenience. It wasn’t a “shipping issue” or a lost parcel. It was an existential threat to consumer safety, supply chain integrity, and the standards we uphold as one of Hawaii’s top hemp and CBD retailers. We sell products that people put into their bodies. That means every gram of material we source must be traceable, tested, and verifiably legal. When shipments are seized on arrival, when compliance is ignored, when the supply chain becomes unpredictable, the safety we promise to our customers is jeopardized. When that trust collapses, everything else becomes meaningless.

We faced a choice: quietly accept the disruption and hope it stopped, or take control of our own future. In that moment of crisis, I chose to stand—with our customers, our community, and our commitment to compliant hemp retailing in Honolulu—not our convenience.

Because HPD’s directive made UPS unusable, we were forced to permanently abandon UPS and FedEx—private carriers who simply couldn’t protect our lawful shipments from unilateral law-enforcement interference. That meant we had one option left: the United States Postal Service (USPS).

USPS, unlike private carriers, is a federal institution bound by federal law. Under the 2018 Farm Bill, federally compliant hemp shipments cannot be arbitrarily seized or delayed. But even then, we didn’t want assumptions—we wanted certainty.

So we did something most businesses in Hawaii’s hemp and CBD industry would never do: we walked directly into the USPS facility in Honolulu, voluntarily opened our own shipment in front of the Honolulu postal inspector, and invited them to examine everything. No hiding. No hesitation. Total transparency.

What happened next changed everything.

The U.S. Postal Inspector—one of the most respected professionals in the state, known for having a 98–99% conviction rate for cases taken to trial—examined our products, our documents, and our process. And for the first time, an authority figure saw firsthand and agreed with what we had been saying all along: that Oahu Dispensary and Provisions was fully compliant, responsible, and operating fully within federal hemp law in Hawaii.

That moment earned us something invaluable: acceptance into something we didn’t even know existed—USPS’s Hemp Industry Whitelist Program, a federal compliance system designed for hemp businesses acting within the boundaries of the law. This whitelist isn’t a loophole; it’s a safeguard. It means USPS recognizes Oahu Dispensary and Provisions as a legitimate, federally compliant hemp retailer, and it ensures that our packages are protected from unlawful search and seizure across Hawaii.

From the day we were approved, something remarkable happened:
USPS has never seized or held a single one of our packages again.

That experience changed how I see our business—and our industry. We didn’t just lose shipping options; we gained clarity. We realized that the gray market isn’t a loophole—it’s a vacuum. A space created by a state regulatory system too restrictive, outdated, or uninterested in understanding the realities of hemp commerce in Honolulu, Waikiki, and across the Hawaiian Islands. In that vacuum, responsible businesses like Oahu Dispensary and Provisions are forced to become de facto regulators, writing our own rules and enforcing our own standards because nobody else will.

We test.
We verify.
We audit.
We recall when necessary.
We document everything.

We do it not because we’re required to, but because the law hasn’t caught up to the responsibility we already carry as one of Hawaii’s most trusted hemp retailers.

We learned the hard way that self-regulation isn’t optional—it’s survival. But that doesn’t mean we want to live without oversight. It’s actually quite the opposite. We are not fighting against regulation; we are fighting for it.

We want a framework that makes what we chose to do voluntarily mandatory for everyone: rigorous third-party lab testing, transparent labeling, traceable batch codes, and clear recall procedures. We want consistency, accountability, and a system where businesses acting in good faith are protected instead of punished. We want Hawaii’s hemp laws to reflect science, consumer safety, and modern commerce, not fear-based assumptions about the hemp industry.

What happened with HPD and UPS wasn’t just a logistical setback—it was a warning shot. It showed how fragile the supply chain becomes when state agencies treat lawful operators like criminals, and when private carriers fold under pressure rather than uphold federal law. It revealed an industry where the only thing standing between consumers and harm is the moral backbone of individual business owners. That’s not a market—that’s a gamble.

Our decision to overhaul our shipping protocol wasn’t an admission of wrongdoing; it was an affirmation of integrity. It was our way of saying, “If the system won’t defend our customers, we will.” And if that makes us outliers, so be it. We’d rather be the business that stood firm than the one that stayed silent.

We’d rather lose money doing the right thing than save money doing nothing.

If one small business can’t fix a broken industry alone, then at least we’ll make sure we refuse to become part of the problem. That’s the commitment I make every time someone walks up to one of the Oahu Dispensary and Provisions kiosks.

Behind that counter isn’t just a product—it’s a promise.
And we intend to keep it.

— Lance Alyas
Founder, Oahu Dispensary and Provisions