The Line I Won’t Let Anyone Cross

How Honolulu’s escalating homeless crisis is impacting businesses, endangering employees, and forcing owners like me at Oahu Dispensary and Provisions to confront what government leaders wont.

There’s a moment in retail—especially street-level retail in a tourist district plagued with homeless—where you have to decide what kind of owner you’re going to be. It happened to me recently, and I didn’t hesitate.

A homeless woman, visibly intoxicated and deteriorating, started aggressively harassing one of my employees at one of our kiosks. My employee was trying to de-escalate and stay calm. But there’s a point where calm isn’t enough, and I refuse to leave my people exposed when that line gets crossed. I immediately drove to my kiosk. I stepped in, made it immediately clear that she needed to leave, and she did. I tried not to make too big of a scene, but these homeless people are ruthless and resentful. I verbally told her to leave and escorted her off the property. I’d do it again without thinking twice.

Unfortunately, this isn’t an isolated incident. It has long been routine and is worsening. The widespread homelessness in our region is not just a matter of poor optics, but directly brings with it real harm through aggressive confrontations, property damage, and even much worse.

Incidentally, this same week, some cousins of mine were visiting. They loved Hawaii—the beauty, the ocean, the culture. But they expressed genuine shock at the scope of the homelessness crisis here. People using drugs openly. People excreting themselves on sidewalks. Encampments that seem to grow and shift but never disappear. They asked me how it had gotten this bad and why, when it’s so expensive. I was embarrassingly reluctant to give them the honest answer—because the honest answer is neglect. Years of it.

I want to be clear: I am not unsympathetic to homelessness. Every day, I buy food for homeless individuals near my kiosks.. I’ve fed literally thousands of people over my years working in the hemp and cannabis industry. I’ve had real and even repeated conversations with many of them. I understand the systemic failures that put people on the street—the collapsed mental health system, the cost of living that’s priced people out of survival, the addiction crisis no one in hawaii seems capable of addressing.

But understanding the problem and being expected to absorb its consequences are two different things. Compassion doesn’t mean tolerating behavior that puts my employees at risk.

This is what government failure looks like when it finally reaches the streets. The government of Hawaii has known about this crisis for years. There have been countless opportunities to invest seriously in mental health infrastructure, addiction treatment, housing-first programs, street outreach that actually works. Instead, we’ve gotten half-measures, bureaucratic paralysis, and a collective shrug from officials who don’t work at sidewalk level. The burden has been quietly transferred onto the businesses and workers who operate in public space—people who didn’t sign up to be social workers or security guards, who just wanted to do their jobs.

Tourists come here for beauty and escape. What they’re increasingly encountering is visible suffering, aggressive behavior, and the ambient anxiety of walking through a district where safety feels uncertain. That erodes the visitor experience, spreads through reviews and word of mouth, and shapes the quiet calculations people make about where to vacation next year. If tourism suffers, every small business in this state suffers with it. Every business I speak with including my own has noticed how slow its gotten. People don’t want to be chided by homeless.

And still, the people responsible for governance treat this as someone else’s problem.

Good government matters. It matters because its absence doesn’t create a vacuum—it creates a transfer. The costs of incompetence don’t disappear; they land on citizens. On workers who endure harassment. On visitors whose image of paradise gets shattered. On business owners who regularly have no choice but to intervene in situations that carry real risk, because no one else will. Is this seriously the predicament that we’re in? Hawaii is the most expensive state , we’re supposed to be getting what we pay for but even that is a longshot.

We shouldn’t have to live like this. We shouldn’t have to fill the void left by elected corrupt officials and bureaucrats who have failed, repeatedly, to do what they were put in office to do.

I’ll keep defending my employees. I’ll keep feeding people who are hungry. I’ll keep fighting for what’s right. I’m done waiting for the people responsible for solving this crisis to finally do their jobs, so the rest of us can stop doing it for them. We must take back control by any reasonable means necessary. Because when we do, thats when things will really change for the better.

Lance Alyas

Oahu Dispensary and Provisions