Protecting the Children…From a Product That Has Never Killed One!
Zero cannabis deaths versus hundreds from alcohol—why Hawaiʻi’s enforcement priorities raise serious questions about public health and influence
Zero.
That number has never changed. Not once. Not in the entire recorded history of cannabis and hemp in the United States has a single person died of a cannabinoid overdose. Not an adult. Not a teenager. Not a child. Zero fatalities. The number is not disputed. It is not a talking point. It is a medical and toxicological fact that no serious researcher anywhere on earth has successfully challenged.
Now let me give you the numbers that Anne Lopez, Kenneth Fink, and the rest of Hawai’i’s regulatory apparatus would prefer you never read in the same sentence as their names.
The Numbers They Bury
The CDC reported that last year alone, 4,000 Americans under 21 died from alcohol poisoning. Not accidents. Not drunk driving. The substance itself killed them. Here in Hawai’i, the Prevention Resource Center documented 600 alcohol-related deaths in a single year. Twelve were under 21. Twelve children dead from a substance sold at every grocery store, every resort minibar, every gas station within walking distance of every school on every island in this state.
I say this not as a statistic. I say it as someone who lost a family member to alcohol. I know what that grief does to a family. God bless everyone carrying that weight. I carry some of it myself.
But I also know exactly what a smokescreen looks like. And I know who is paid to generate it.
Follow the Money
When Anne Lopez mobilizes her office against federally compliant hemp retailers, ask yourself who benefits. When Kenneth Fink advances regulations designed to eliminate every hemp operator in this state, ask yourself who drafted them and whose attorneys were in the room. When legislators invoke the safety of children to justify criminalizing a product that has killed precisely nobody, ask yourself who is funding their campaigns and hosting their fundraisers.
The answer is not complicated. Hawai’i’s licensed medical cannabis dispensaries paid millions for state-protected monopoly licenses designed from inception to prevent competition. Eight licenses. The entire state. A closed market maintained by legislative capture so brazen it would embarrass a first-year political science student. When that wall is threatened by small, federally compliant hemp operators, these businesses do not compete or innovate. They make phone calls. They write checks. And then, with remarkable efficiency, the Attorney General and the Department of Health discover an urgent public health crisis that nobody noticed until it started costing the monopoly market share.
That is not governance. That is a protection racket with a state seal on the letterhead.
“Protecting the Children”
When officials invoke child safety to justify this campaign, they are not making a public health argument. A public health argument requires data. And the data does not support a single element of their position. Cannabis and hemp have killed zero people. Zero children. Zero adults. The number has never moved.
Meanwhile the substance they license and sell in every tourist corridor on this island killed 600 people in Hawai’i in a single year. Twelve were under 21. And no narcotics division ran undercover operations into Waikīkī bars. No Attorney General held a press conference about the epidemic killing children with the product that generates hundreds of millions in tax revenue and employs the donors.
Instead they came for the hemp kiosks. The businesses with zero documented overdose deaths in the entire history of the product’s existence.
If Attorney General Anne Lopez or Department of Health Director Kenneth Fink can produce a single peer-reviewed study, a single coroner’s report, a single documented fatality attributable to hemp — I will adjust my position accordingly and issue a public apology to them!
That offer stands. It has never been accepted, though, and surely won’t ever be because they can’t produce a document that does not exist. They can’t point to a crisis that does not exist. What exists is a monopoly losing money and officials paid to protect it.
What Actually Protects Children
Real child protection looks like mandatory consumer education, child-resistant packaging enforced uniformly, a properly funded poison control infrastructure, and honest science-based labeling. That framework I support without reservation. That conversation I will have with any lawmaker or parent in this state who wants to have it with the actual numbers on the table and the lobbyist checks disclosed.
What I will never accept is criminalizing businesses that the data has never implicated in a single death, while the actual killing continues at 600 per year and nobody on Beretania Street loses a moment of sleep.
Zero is still zero.
The only question left is whether the people running this state are too corrupt to say it out loud — or simply too compromised to care!
Lance Alyas
Oahu Dispensary and Provisions