The Same Can That Rings Up at Target Is a Felony in Hawaii

How Hawaii’s Act 269 Turned Federally Legal Hemp THC Drinks Sold at Target Into Felony Contraband — And Why Alyas v. Lopez Could Reshape Hemp Law Nationwide

Target just put intoxicating hemp THC beverages on shelves in nearly 400 stores across Florida, Texas, Illinois, and Minnesota. Five milligrams. Ten milligrams. The kind of can you grab off a cooler shelf next to a Celsius and walk to the register without a second thought.

Same products. Same lab tests. Same interstate supply chain running through every state in the country — including Hawaii, where Act 269 is written to treat those exact cans as felony contraband.

Think about what that means. The product didn’t change. The chemistry didn’t change. The certificate of analysis didn’t change. Hawaii changed the law — specifically, Hawaii changed the testing methodology used to define what counts as hemp. Not the federal standard. Not Congress’s standard. Hawaii’s own invented standard, applied through HAR Chapter 11-37, using a post-decarboxylation “total THC” calculation that the 2018 Farm Bill never authorized any state to impose as a criminal enforcement trigger.

So the same can that rings up clean at a Target register in Tampa triggers inspection, seizure, forfeiture, destruction of inventory, and criminal prosecution in Honolulu. Not because the product is dangerous. Not because it fails federal law. Because Hawaii rewrote the definition of hemp to protect the regulated medical cannabis industry from competition — and their own legislative record says so.

That’s not regulatory caution. That’s regulatory capture dressed up as public safety!

The state put a target on the backs of retailers and consumers alike. Small business owners who followed federal law, sourced compliant products, maintained certificates of analysis for every batch, and built livelihoods around a federally legal industry — now facing the threat of criminal prosecution for selling the same product Target is rolling out in four states this week.

That’s why we filed. That’s why we’re not going away.

Alyas v. Lopez, U.S. District Court, District of Hawaii, No. 1:26-cv-00035 is a live federal case challenging Hawaii’s Act 269 and the administrative rules that implement it. The legal question at the center of the case — whether a state can substitute its own testing methodology for Congress’s delta-9 THC standard and use that substitution to re-criminalize federally lawful hemp — isn’t just a Hawaii question. It’s the question every hemp business in America is going to face. Hawaii is just eight months ahead of the rest of the country.

We stood up…because someone had to!