I want to tell you about a conversation I had recently. I have thought about it every single day since, and by the end of this piece, you will understand why.
A man told me his business has been going very well lately. There’d been a sharp uptick, specifically, since July 1. He wasn’t a stranger. He’s someone I’ve known for a while—a guy who has served real time, completely unrepentant about how he makes his living, and entirely comfortable moving in the shadows.
He sells pills, occasionally meth, and, as of his most recent arrest just earlier this year, fentanyl. Perhaps because he beat the case due to a faulty search warrant, he was feeling especially untouchable. Whatever the reason, he was perfectly willing to freely tell me, completely unprompted, that the best thing that happened to him this year has been “the new hemp laws. Well, after me beating that bitch ass case they hit me with,” he added sardonically.
He told me to stop complaining on Instagram about “this shit with these hemp laws” because the state’s crackdown had driven his own numbers up so sharply it was impossible not to notice. Although he said it with a smile and apparently in jest, there was an unmistakable menace to his comment and delivery.
“Man, you lucky I like you bro,” he said, his words hardening further, carrying an edge that was deeply disconcerting. “Anyone else who were to play with my money like that and what happens ain’t good.” As he said it, he ran his index finger repeatedly across his tattooed throat—the universal sign for decapitation—a broad, unsettling smile never leaving his face.
He drew the line himself: July 1, and business is booming. He said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
What He Understood That the State Pretends Not To
Here is what that man grasped instantly—standing there giving me a threat wrapped in a quarterly update—that ten years of Hawaiʻi cannabis policy has been carefully constructed to deny:
People do not magically stop seeking relief just because you shutter the store where they used to buy it. They simply look somewhere else. And when you seal off every affordable, legal, or semi-legal avenue one by one, that “somewhere else” gets darker at every step, until the final open door left standing is his.
He is not competing with licensed medical dispensaries. He is competing with whatever a desperate person turns to when their legal options vanish. Every door the state closes upstream serves a new customer directly to his porch. It is his fundamental business model. The July 1 enforcement sweep was an unpaid marketing campaign run on his behalf by the state.
Follow the Person, Not Policy
Picture a patient—chronic pain, a valid card, a reliable routine, someone who meticulously followed every rule this system ever wrote. Look at what the last decade actually did to her, executed step by step in her name.
First, the licensed dispensaries priced her out. The state’s own patient registry is actively shrinking—not because people healed, but because they can no longer afford to stay legal.
So she turned to a caregiver or a cooperative grow—patients pooling resources to raise sun-grown plants at a fraction of dispensary prices. But then the licensed operators went to the Legislature and got those options restricted, wrapping every limitation in the language of protection. (Just as we discussed in Part 5.)
Then came hemp. Cheaper, accessible, no card required—for a vast number of patients, it was simply the only relief they could afford. That is the door I stood behind. But eventually, along came Act 269 and the sudden June enforcement drive, and in eight days, that door was slammed shut too.
Now count the doors:
• Dispensary: Unaffordable.
• Cooperative: Restricted, for her “protection.”
• Caregiver grow: Restricted, for her “protection.”
• Hemp shop: Criminalized, for her “protection.”
Every affordable path to her own medicine has been sealed shut—and every seal was justified as an act of protection.
And standing at the very end of that long hallway, past every deadbolt, smiling, with his business up since July 1, is the man who sells fentanyl.
One Word
Every tier of this system was built on a single word. The licenses, the testing mandates, the seed-to-sale tracking, the criminal penalties, the enforcement that suddenly found its urgency in eight days—all of it was defended, session after session, in the name of protection.
It is the word invoked to gut caregivers, to restrict cooperatives, and to criminalize hemp shops. And here is what that word produced, measured not by noble intentions, but by hard outcomes on the ground: a patient systematically priced out of the legal market and escorted, one “protective” law at a time, toward the most lethal illicit market that has ever existed.
The man who profits from every closed door in this state looked at what the government did and saw a massive gift. If you want to understand who a policy truly serves, the people who quietly profit from it will always tell you more than the lobbyists testifying for it ever will.
Those lobbyists, the crooks they represent who run the dispensaries, the shameful government figures who capitulated to them, and the morally bankrupt officials at the DOH and AG’s Office all insist that this is just about protecting the people.
They are entirely right. They just failed to clarify that the people they were referring to are degenerate thugs like them, who profit from pain and couldn’t care less about anyone but themselves!