What I Couldn’t Say In 800 Words
Hawaiʻi’s hemp crackdown exposes a widening gap between public sentiment, legislative action, and the future of compliant cannabis businesses
Civil Beat ran my piece Friday. I made the main points I have long been making but appreciate greatly the opportunity to reach a broader readership and more diverse audience. I emphasized how the hemp crackdown signals how enforcement has drifted from the aims originally guiding it, how compliant businesses are being pushed into limbo, how driving demand underground is the opposite of public safety, and similar such subjects.
I knew intuitively, before I submitted it, that most readers would likely agree with me. After all, I‘ve been on this island long enough to feel where the public actually sits on this. Not where the legislature sits. Not where the eight license holders sit. But where the person in line at Foodland sits.
So on a subconscious level, at least, I expected the response to be supportive. Yet even being aware of that didn’t prepare me for the actual impact of reading the many positive comments and being struck by the sheer force of them all.
Being The Named Plaintiff Is A Lonely Job
You spend months watching the case through pleadings and motions. You start to feel like the argument belongs to you. Like you’re the only one still holding it up. Then, dozens of strangers tell you, in their own words, that they’ve been watching the same thing and reached the same conclusion without anyone putting it in their mouth.
One commenter denounced the state’s approach harshly, comically lambasting it “cosplay enforcement.” Another fumed at the pedantic, belittling way that the people are treated by their government, as if ignorant children incapable of deciding for themselves. Another raised the valid point about how the tourism authority courts the exact demographic that shows up in every other destination market with a medical card already in their wallet. Still others pointed to a decades-old study predicting that criminalizing cannabis here would push locals toward harder drugs, and asked the question I couldn’t ask in print. If they knew the outcome, was the outcome the point.
I had been carrying those observations privately for a long time. Seeing them come back at me, from people who don’t know me and owe me nothing, did something I didn’t expect. It reminded me the argument isn’t mine. I’m just the one with standing to file it. And it reminded me that we all, at a base level, are guided by the same principles, share the same overarching values, and ultimately, share in the human experience and its finer nuances.
No one needs to be taught that mistreating others is wrong, or that unfairness is problematic. Studies show even chimpanzees and other animals react ferociously when they observe their counterparts being rewarded with additional food or benefits that are not fairly divided or connected to their independent achievements.
People Are Pragmatic. They Always Have Been.
There’s a fashionable cynicism now that says people are tribal. Misinformed. Only capable of thinking inside whatever script their team handed them. I don’t buy it. I’ve never bought it.
What I read in those comments was people reasoning from first principles. Nobody had to be persuaded that unfairness is bad. Nobody needed an economist to explain that shutting down compliant operators shifts demand to noncompliant ones. Nobody required a lecture on the difference between passing a law and reinterpreting one.
They arrived at all of it on their own. Because those aren’t ideological positions. They’re pragmatic ones. They’re what people figure out when you leave them alone long enough to think.
We’re all working from the same material at root. We want the rules to be stable. We want enforcement pointed at actual harm. We want small operators to be able to plan. We want our neighbors treated fairly and justly, just as we want for ourselves.
The Legislature Does Not Hear From These People
The gap between what the public actually believes and what the state does in the public’s name, though, is grossly mismatched and wildly disproportionate.
Shockingly, it is in fact far wider than most people realize. Legislators hear from and act due to the influence of lobbyists. They are shaped and guided by those with their own selfish interests at the core and at the forefront, such as licensed operators with paid representation, or massive entities with endless cash to burn in their quest to stomp out the small businesses and little guy.
They don’t hear often enough from the majority of constituents who don’t or can’t write, plead, or cajole their officials. Worse—far worse—they don’t care!
What Matters In The End
Ultimately, the court will resolve the legal question. Alyas v. Lopez is where that gets answered. But the broader question — what kind of state Hawaiʻi wants to be, whether small business can plan here, whether enforcement is proportional to actual harm — that one can’t be answered by a single judge because no single judge can substitute their own judgement for that of all of our own.
Those broader questions get answered by the people. People like you and I, writing articles, reading the comments under a Civil Beat op-ed, writing their own comments—deciding, sharing, and expressing whether any of this sounds right to them.
Based on what I saw and read this weekend, it most certainly doesn’t. But I’ll let you be the judge!
Lance Alyas
Oahu Dispensary and Provisions