The Illusion of Regulation: Why Prohibition Creates the Very Chaos It Claims to Prevent
How banning hemp products fuels black market sales, endangers public safety, kills legal oversight, and undermines responsible businesses in Hawaiʻi and across the United States
The Illusion of Regulation: Why Prohibition Creates the Very Chaos It Claims to Prevent
Every time a politician calls for a blanket ban on hemp-derived products, they frame it as “consumer protection.” The pitch is simple and reassuring: clean up the market, eliminate bad actors, and restore order. But this narrative is a house of cards. A ban is not regulation; it is the surrender of regulation. And it guarantees an outcome far more dangerous than anything we face today.
The reality is that demand doesn’t vanish when the law changes. It simply goes dark. When legal, transparent businesses are forced to shut down, the black market doesn’t shrink—it throws a party. What is lost is the crucial safety net, the oversight, and the accountability that legitimate operators like we at Oahu Dispensary and Provisions provide.
The Price of Prohibition: What We All Lose
At Oahu Dispensary and Provisions, we don’t just follow the rules; we enforce standards that set the bar for the entire industry. We don’t hide behind loopholes. We invest heavily in the finest companies that provide rigorous third-party lab testing, screening every batch for heavy metals, pesticides, contaminants, and guaranteed potency accuracy. We ensure transparent batch tracking so every product can be traced back to its source, and we enforce strict age-gating, turning minors away every single day.
When you tear away this legal framework, the system instantly collapses. In a legal market, testing is verified for safety and potency, and products are clean and unadulterated. In the illicit black market, there is no incentive to test, and the cheapest product becomes the only standard. In the legal market, age restrictions are enforced daily to the strictest of standards. In the black market, there are zero age limits, and a street seller becomes a primary gateway for youth access—anyone under 21 can obtain products with ease. In the legal market, accountability exists with verifiable supply chains and GMP-certified companies. In the black market, the consumer is alone with no recourse for bad reactions or mislabeling, and bioaccumulation becomes a serious risk. In the legal market, tax revenue is channeled to state economies. In the black market, untaxed profit fuels criminal networks.
A nine-month, or a federal ban doesn’t eliminate the demand. It simply strips away the safeguards responsible businesses spent years building.
The Economic Truth No One Wants to Discuss
The 2018 Farm Bill didn’t just create a new market; it built a legal ecosystem—generating jobs, revenue, and compliance systems that pull money away from criminal networks. A prohibitionist snapback doesn’t return us to 2017. It returns us to a pre-protection world, where untested, mislabeled, and truly dangerous products circulate freely and untaxed. A ban doesn’t “solve” anything. It is a vacuum that sucks out every legitimate player and hands the entire industry back to people who answer to no one.
There Is a Smarter Way Forward
We in this industry are not opposed to regulation; most of us have been begging for FAIR regulation. What we oppose is the dangerous fantasy that prohibition is a regulatory solution. It has never worked—not for alcohol, not for cannabis, and it will not work here.
A genuine regulatory framework should do the opposite of prohibition: it should create order, not abandon it. This means national testing standards, clear and uniform labeling, federally mandated age-gating with real penalties for violators, and real enforcement against the corner-cutters—not against businesses that follow the rules. Responsible operators like us don’t fear regulation. We fear a world without it.
A Ban Isn’t Protection—It’s Abdication of Responsibility
The people pushing prohibition want you to believe they are the “responsible” party. But banning a product instead of regulating it is the government admitting it can’t handle the responsibility of oversight.
It is the deliberate destruction of the safe, verifiable, transparent market consumers rely on, replaced with a shadowy system that endangers them.
I believe in the integrity of what we sell. I believe in the systems we’ve built to keep people safe. If we truly care about public safety, we should be building regulation—not tearing it down. That’s why I will do my part to fight for whats right so the industry can maintain its freedom and advance in a way that will benefit humanity for lifetimes to come.
Lance Alyas
Oahu Dispensary and Provisions