THE DISPENSARY WARS PART 2: SOMEBODY WAS WATCHING

Former Noa Botanicals Employee Alleges Moldy Medical Cannabis Was Sprayed With Sulfur and Sold While Hawaii’s Department of Health Looked Elsewhere

They sprayed sulfur on the mold and sold you the weed.

That is the story a former Noa Botanicals employee brought us, with photographs, from inside the company’s licensed cultivation operation — the same company whose chief executive “developed” a bill with a committee chairman in Part 1. Remember the state’s entire justification for criminalizing hemp shops: licensed cannabis is safe because somebody is watching.

Here is what the watching looked like.

The Before

The early photographs show a real medical facility: lab coats, hairnets, gloves, full sanitary protocol. The crew believed in the place. Hold onto that image and cherish it, because it does not survive this story.

The Collapse

While every other business languishes for years just to get a simple permit from the Department of Planning and Permitting’s Building Division, Noa Botanicals was opening up new locations faster than Tony Montana’s money counter in the Scarface montage. And just like Tony’s empire, things started to go south. The company’s new Waikīkī dispensary was failing, so somebody downtown decided the farm would pay for it. Adam, a well-liked manager who held the operation together, was fired first, then cultivators after him, until a skeleton crew — at points as few as four people — was responsible for roughly two thousand living plants. That is five hundred plants per person, in a tropical greenhouse, every single day.

As luck would have it, it was at this juncture that the dehumidifiers broke and leaked water straight onto the canopy. Nobody fixed them, because there was nobody left and no budget. The mold arrived exactly on schedule — pink, and spreading through the rows.

A licensed cultivator facing a mold outbreak has clear duties: cull the crop, eat the loss, fix the machines. Every one of those options costs money, but that is supposed to be irrelevant because every one protects the patient, and the patients are supposed to matter far, far, far more than the money!

The “Fix”

According to the account, the patients were the last thing cultivation manager Brandon Fenske had a cheaper idea: micronized sulfur, sprayed on the plants, pitched upstairs as a cure-all. And it was approved from the downtown Honolulu office — by an executive the farm workers knew as “Kar”: Karlyn Laulusa, the chief executive of Noa Botanicals. Yes, the same Karlyn Laulusa from the committee chairman’s email in Part 1.

So they sprayed sulfur directly onto flowering cannabis headed for dispensary shelves.

Understand what that means. Sulfur is only used early in a plant’s life, and every serious grower knows why: residue left on flower converts to sulfur dioxide when the flower is lit. The patient inhales the remediation! Sulfur dioxide is a respiratory irritant, and a medical cannabis patient is, by definition, someone already unwell.

That is the charitable reading, in which the sulfur was an honest attempt to fight the mold. The uncharitable reading is simpler: you cannot sell moldy cannabis, but you can sell cannabis that has been sprayed.

The After

The later photographs show the same facility with every standard gone. One shows a worker processing cannabis bare-handed, in casual clothes, with an open bucket of flower in their lap. No gloves, no lab coat, no protocol — not relaxed, but extinct.

By the end of the period described, day-to-day operations at the farm were effectively being run by a member of the security staff, because she was one of the only steady figures left on the property. Security, managing cultivation at a state-licensed medical operation. You could not write satire this sharp if you tried.

The rest of the leadership — CFO Jacob, executives Belinda and Ty — visited the farm once or twice across the entire period. Their whole product line was molding, sulfured, and running on a skeleton crew, and they made one or two appearances.

Laulusa was the exception. After the cuts, she began showing up at the farm regularly — and what she talked about over lunch was not dehumidifiers. That conversation connects this farm directly to the documents in Part 1, and it gets its own installment.

The Question

The source carries real guilt over the product that went out the door, and came to us because, in their words, it is their way of doing what’s right. Be clear about who the workers are in this story: they were handed buckets and told to work. The people who cut the crew, approved the sulfur, and stayed downtown own every bit of what happened at that farm.

Now ask the only question that matters. The Department of Health held every inspection power it needed over this facility. Either nobody looked, or somebody looked and did nothing — while the state spent that same stretch at the Capitol, arming Act 269 with criminal penalties, seizure, and forfeiture aimed at the hemp shops down the street.

Somebody was watching, all right. They were watching the market share!