The state says flower, pre-rolls and vapes were already prohibited. Hemp retailers say years of limited enforcement allowed a market to develop that is now being removed.

Lance Alyas says other hemp retailers in Hawaii have contacted him privately since he sued the state over its hemp rules, but few are willing to discuss the dispute publicly.

“I can’t tell you how many have reached out to me throughout this process expressing shock at my willingness to sue and then take this on in the media as well,” Alyas, owner of Oahu Dispensary and Provisions, told High Times.

He says enforcement visits have contributed to that reluctance. Alyas described Department of Health inspectors as “old marshals and sheriffs from a western movie” who were “brash, abrasive, stern, and domineering.”

Alyas operates four stores on Oahu. He and another hemp retailer, Kyler Falces-Cachola, are suing Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez and Department of Health Director Kenneth Fink in federal court, challenging several parts of the state’s hemp regulatory system.

The lawsuit comes as the Department of Health and Attorney General have begun statewide enforcement against retailers selling noncompliant products, including hemp flower, THCA flower, pre-rolls and vapes.

Alyas says officials visited two of his stores simultaneously, photographed products and explained which items could no longer be sold.

“They gave us a warning about the products that are not able to be sold, so we had to take them off our shelves to make sure we’re going to the court with clean hands,” he said.

No inventory was confiscated, Alyas said, but officials warned about possible seizures, embargoes, fines, enforcement and arrest if prohibited products remained for sale.

The state says nothing new was banned

The Hawaii Department of Health says the current enforcement should not be understood as a new ban.

“The 2025 changes to Hawaiʻi’s hemp law created a registration system for hemp retailers and distributors, it did not newly prohibit hemp flower, pre-rolls, vaping products, or concentrates. Those restrictions predate the registration requirement.”

Hawaii Department of Health, to High Times

Act 14, adopted in 2020, prohibited the sale of hemp leaf or floral material intended to be smoked or inhaled and cannabinoid products intended for aerosolized respiratory delivery. It also established penalties of up to $10,000 for each separate offense.

The 2025 legislation, Act 269, created a registry for manufactured hemp product retailers and distributors and expanded the state’s ability to inspect businesses, seize noncompliant products and pursue violations.

Licensed medical cannabis operators had been pressing for stronger enforcement before Act 269. Noa Botanicals CEO Karlyn Laulusa lobbied House Consumer Protection and Commerce Committee Chair Scot Matayoshi and other lawmakers, arguing that licensed dispensaries were losing business to unregulated hemp retailers. According to Honolulu Civil Beat, Alyas later obtained correspondence between Laulusa and Matayoshi through a public-records request. He characterizes Hawaiʻi’s eight medical cannabis licensees as “the Hateful Eight.”

Noa Botanicals, Aloha Green Apothecary and Cure Oahu all supported the new rules during the legislative process.

The situation reflects a recurring feature of cannabis markets: written law and enforcement do not always move together.

A prohibition that is rarely enforced can coexist with an open market for years, allowing stores, suppliers and consumer demand to develop around it. Increased enforcement can then change the market without the underlying prohibition itself being new. The conduct was tolerated long enough to build businesses around it. Now the prohibition is being enforced.

Ninety percent of the revenue, gone

For Alyas, the change has been substantial.

He says his company lost about 90% of its revenue and roughly 25% of its workforce after removing the affected products. He has kept current employees at the same pay and hours but says the company cannot continue for long under present conditions.

The legal dispute

Alyas and fellow hemp retailer Kyler Falces-Cachola are plaintiffs in Alyas et al. v. Lopez et al., Case No. 1:26-cv-00035-JAO-WRP, before the U.S. District Court for the District of Hawaiʻi. The defendants are Hawaiʻi Attorney General Anne E. Lopez and Department of Health Director Kenneth S. Fink, M.D., both sued in their official capacities.

Alyas is now waiting for U.S. District Judge Jill A. Otake to rule on two pending motions: the retailers’ request for a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement while the case proceeds, and the state’s motion to dismiss the amended complaint. After hearing arguments on both on July 2, Otake took them under advisement and said she would issue a written order.

“If we don’t get a judge’s decision soon, we will have to close down probably within two or three weeks,” he said.

DOH acknowledges that businesses may be affected and confirms that there is currently no pathway allowing retailers to continue selling the prohibited categories.

“The Hawaiʻi Department of Health recognizes that removing certain hemp products from sale can have an impact on businesses,” the department told High Times.

That position is consistent with what Andrew Goff, head of DOH’s Office of Medical Cannabis Control and Regulation, said shortly before enforcement began. “You had time to change your inventory or pivot from whatever industry you want to go into,” Goff told Hawaii News Now in June, adding that the state had provided businesses sufficient time to adjust.

Under current DOH rules and guidance, retailers can continue selling compliant CBD products and certain topicals, tinctures, softgels, gummies, tablets, capsules, powders and beverages, subject to product-specific THC limits, testing, packaging and labeling requirements.

“At present, Hawaiʻi law does not provide an alternative pathway for hemp retailers to continue selling prohibited products,” DOH said. “DOH can, however, provide education and technical assistance to help businesses understand the existing law and prepare for future law changes.”

Alyas says those categories cannot sustain his stores.

“Our business is a majority, 90% of sales, of these types of product,” he said, referring to flower, pre-rolls and other products removed from sale. “We cannot sustain selling only these products. That’s currently what we’re doing now, only selling the topical, and soft gels, etc., and this is killing us.”

“People want smokable, not topical, that they can get online.”

Where the demand goes

The enforcement also changes how adults can access cannabis in Hawaii. Adult-use marijuana remains illegal, sitting outside the regulated market, while cannabis is available through the state’s medical dispensary system.

The possibility that some hemp retailers would close was also addressed publicly before enforcement began. State Rep. Scot Matayoshi, chair of the House Consumer Protection and Commerce Committee, also defended the policy in June. “If putting these people out of business means getting these products off the streets … then they should be out of business,” he told Hawaii News Now, referring to products he said were reaching minors and circumventing other state laws.

A 2025 economic analysis commissioned by DOH estimated Hawaii’s total cannabis market across medical, gray and illicit sources at between $16.5 million and $32 million per month. Legal medical dispensaries generated about $5.3 million monthly.

Removing hemp flower and other intoxicating products from retail therefore reduces one channel through which adults outside the medical program have been obtaining cannabis.

Some of that demand could move toward medical dispensaries, while adults who do not qualify for or participate in the medical program have fewer regulated options, and some of that demand could move to the illicit market.

The delayed federal hemp ban and Hawaii

The future of the same products remains under debate at the federal level.

The 2018 Farm Bill defined hemp using a limit of 0.3% delta-9 THC on a dry-weight basis. That created room for products containing considerably more THCA while remaining below the federal delta-9 threshold.

Two flower samples provided by Alyas illustrate the difference. One contained 0.2104% delta-9 THC but 28.329% THCA, producing 25.055% total THC after applying the standard conversion formula. Another contained 0.169% delta-9 THC and 16.804% THCA, producing 14.906% total THC.

Congress changed that framework in Public Law 119-37 in November 2025. The new definition uses total THC, expressly including THCA, and places additional restrictions on finished hemp-derived cannabinoid products. Those provisions were scheduled to take effect November 12, 2026. On September 2, President Trump signed a funding bill that delays most of them until December 11. A carve-out leaves the November 12 date in place for products containing cannabinoids that cannot be naturally produced by the plant, which does not include THCA flower.

The additional month is intended to give Congress more time to consider a longer-term regulatory framework for hemp-derived cannabinoid products. Bills already introduced in Congress propose alternatives ranging from longer implementation delays to new rules for particular hemp products.

Alyas believes naturally occurring THCA flower and pre-rolls could remain part of that market if federal lawmakers eventually choose regulation instead of prohibition.

Hawaii’s rules do not currently make that distinction for smokable hemp. Flower and pre-rolls remain prohibited regardless of their labeled delta-9 THC or THCA content, leaving retailers such as Alyas dependent on the narrower range of manufactured hemp products permitted by the state.

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The U.S. Senate has voted to retain a one-month delay on the federal crackdown on intoxicating hemp products by tabling an amendment to a federal funding bill that would have kept the ban at its original start date of November 12, The Hill reports.

Introduced by North Carolina Sen. Ted Budd (R) and nearly a dozen bipartisan lawmakers, senators rejected the amendment overnight on Saturday in a 61-32 vote.

While President Trump (R) signed the ban into law as part of a funding bill to reopen the federal government last year, the White House has since pushed for lawmakers to change or delay the rules to protect full-spectrum hemp products, which the new restrictions would target once the ban takes effect.

Hemp industry representatives are hopeful that the delay will give the extra time they need to pursue federal regulations to save the multi-billion-dollar hemp industry.

”The next chapter begins today. The Hemp Beverage Alliance stands ready to work with Congress, the White House and stakeholders throughout the country to pass federal legislation that is strong, sensible, reliable, and prioritizes public safety.” — Christopher Lackner, founder and president of the Hemp Beverage Alliance, in a statement

Meanwhile, Budd called the nationwide sale of intoxicating hemp products “a public health crisis that deserves this Senate’s immediate attention.”

“Our children should never be the testing ground for an industry willing to exploit a loophole in federal law for profit,” he said in the report.

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“There are products that have not been subject to the same rigorous testing that the medical marijuana requires.”

By Stewart Yerton, Honolulu Civil Beat

It happens all the time now at Oʻahu Dispensary and Provisions in Waikīkī: A prospective customer like Blake Birdwell comes looking for a pre-rolled hemp cigarette or hemp-based edible, only to find the kiosk’s shelves are empty of such goods—by recent order of the Hawaiʻi Department of Health.

“It’s really shitty,” Birdwell said on a recent afternoon after making the rounds at other shops like Natural Mystic, Vape Hawaiʻi and Hawaiʻi’s Cheapest. “They’re all telling me, ‘No.’”

It’s a new reality for people like Birdwell who until recently were able to purchase a range of THC products without a medical marijuana card at dozens of shops across ​​the state—often at a lower price than the products for sale at Hawaiʻi’s officially licensed medical marijuana dispensaries.

The state has now cracked down on sellers of hemp-based products that had been operating under a loophole in federal law, and that’s set up a battle in which Oʻahu Dispensary and Provisions’ owner, Lance Alyas, has asked a federal judge to stop the crackdown.

The suit, which alleges the state has improperly recriminalized federally legal hemp, has gained national attention in legal news reports. The free-market libertarian magazine Reason, which generally opposes government-regulated monopolies, has also weighed in.

It’s the latest iteration of an ongoing struggle to regulate cannabis in Hawaiʻi, which has become widely available for adults to use recreationally in two dozen states.

It’s also a matter of life and death for Alyas’ business, he says, which operates four locations on Oʻahu.

“We have 20 people at risk of losing their jobs,” he said.

Booming Market For Low-THC Hemp Products

Hemp is the same plant species as cannabis sativa—or marijuana—which is a federally controlled substance, though hemp has been historically grown for non-intoxicating uses and contains lower levels of tetrahydrocannabinol or THC. Congress’s 2018 Farm Bill made hemp legal as long as the plants contained no more than 0.3 percent delta-9 THC, the ingredient that gets people high, by weight.

That led to a national flood of products—including gummy candies, vapes, drinks and pre-rolled cigarettes—containing THC derived from federally legal hemp.

In 2020, the Hawaiʻi Legislature passed a law making it legal to grow hemp, but not to produce or sell hemp-based THC products.

Such products proliferated legally on the continent, however, thanks to the 2018 farm bill. By 2024, the hemp-based cannabinoid market had grown to $3.5 billion and was expected to reach $4.4 billion by 2029, the Brightfield Group, a consumer goods research firm reported.

Others, such as Portland-based market researcher Beau Whitney, estimate the market now is actually closer to $30 billion to $44 billion, thanks in part to THC beverages.

Adult beverages containing THC derived from hemp have become so popular and ubiquitous that even Target has begun selling the drinks in hundreds of stores in four states.

Until recently, Hawaiʻi residents could order drinks online, shipped to their door, from brands with names like Willie’s Remedy+, produced by the singer Willie Nelson.

The challenge for Hawaiʻi regulators has been how to deal with such products, which are legal under federal law, coming into the state, where they weren’t supposed to be sold.

‘Premier Pakalolo Provider’ Lobbied For Change

Noa Botanicals is one of Hawaiʻi’s eight licensed medical marijuana dispensaries not subject to the crackdown. Although technically a maker and distributor of medication people can buy only with a doctor’s approval, Noa Botanicals’s marketing looks more like that of a lifestyle brand—not a medical product for patients seeking pain medication.

Its Instagram page, for instance, calls itself “Hawaii’s Premier Pakalolo Provider” and carries the slogan “Find your Hawaiʻi High.” A recent post shows greenhouse workers posing with big marijuana plants above the text “Bud Huntaz out here baggin’ da real trophies.” Other posts feature local music artists HIRIE and Sierra Lucia.

Starting in late 2024, Noa Botanicals’s chief executive, Karlyn Laulusa, began lobbying House Consumer Protection and Commerce Committee Chair Scot Matayoshi (D) and other lawmakers about unlicensed retailers selling hemp-based THC products.

The crux of the problem, as Laulusa described it in emails to lawmakers, was that the licensed, highly regulated dispensaries were losing business to unregulated retailers selling hemp-derived products that were illegal in Hawaiʻi.

The number of unlicensed retailers had boomed from 10 on Oʻahu in 2024 to 74 by early 2025, she wrote, and were taking over the market. Lualusa cited a market analysis from the Department of Health estimating that out of a total annual market of $198 million to $360 million, only $60 million was going to licensed dispensaries. The rest—$138 million to $300 million annually—was going to the unregulated market.

While all of this was happening, buyers were dropping out of the official medical marijuana program. In December 2021, there were 34,125 Hawaiʻi residents with a medical marijuana card, according to the Hawaiʻi Department of Health. DOH’s most recently available report, from the end of last year, shows 28,735 people had cards—a 16 percent decline.

Meanwhile, Laulusa told lawmakers that the Department of Health’s Office of Medical Cannabis Control and Regulation had authority over only the regulated dispensaries. The regulators couldn’t do anything about the unregulated ones.

The result of Laulusa’s lobbying efforts was Act 269 of 2025, which was supported by the Honolulu Police Department and the prosecutor’s office, as well as two other licensed dispensaries, Aloha Green Apothecary and Cure Oahu.

The law, combined with interim administrative rules, gave the health department the ability to require all sellers to register with the agency and open their stores to inspection by cannabis control agents who could tell the retailers what products they needed to remove from their shelves.

As Andrew Goff, chief of DOH’s Office of Medical Cannabis Control and Regulation, describes it, ACT 269 and administrative rules gives the office the ability to enforce existing law. The registration requirement enables the office to know what retailers are selling cannabis products, so the office can let the retailers know what products are allowed and what are not.

Alyas, who obtained the correspondence between Noa Botanicals’s Laulusa and Matayoshi through a public records request, questioned whether lawmakers should be working so closely with industry executives to shape a new law.

Laulusa did not respond to requests for comment.

Matayoshi said it’s part of his job to communicate with industries the state closely regulates and solve problems. Not talking to the regulated industry, he said, would be failing to do due diligence.

“If we’re going to be regulating doctors,” he said, for example, “I think we should be talking to doctors.”

In any case, DOH began enforcing the rules in July, which has led to the situation where people like Birdwell can’t get pre-rolled hemp reefers from places like Oʻahu Dispensary and Provisions.

As president of the Drug Policy Forum of Hawaiʻi, Nikos Leverenz generally supports legalization and regulation of adult-use cannabis. Although he testified against Act 269, Leverenz did say DOH’s enforcement rules can provide a useful framework for regulating sales of cannabis sold to adults—if policymakers legalized such sales outside of medical marijuana dispensaries.

“The DOH has the authority to do what it’s doing now, but I don’t think it’s in the best interest of consumers,” he said. “And it’s certainly not in the interest of businesses outside of the licensed cannabis dispensaries.”

Economic Protectionism Or Consumer Protection?

This echoes one of Alyas’s main complaints: that policymakers are favoring the licensed dispensaries over anyone else, engaging in economic protectionism of a medical cannabis dispensary industry that’s had the benefit of a government-imposed oligopoly for a decade.

When the Legislature established the medical dispensary program in 2015, it limited the number of licenses to eight, with each licensee permitted to operate two retail dispensaries. Over time the Legislature increased the number of dispensaries a licensee can run to four if the licensee can show the location is needed to serve a rural or underserved population.

Alyas questions why, if the market calls for more retail locations, policymakers haven’t simply granted more licenses, rather than letting the same eight businesses, which he calls “the Hateful Eight,” expand operations.

More pointedly, Alyas questions the Department of Health’s 2025 decision to let Noa Botanicals open a new retail location on Royal Hawaiian Avenue under the statutory provision allowing new locations in rural or underserved areas, when there already were two competing licensed shops in Waikīkī.

DOH said there was only one licensed dispensary at the time it approved Noa Botanicals’s request to open its Waikīkī location, and there are now a total of two in Waikīkī.

The medical marijuana control office makes its determinations based on the licensee’s ability to serve and supply patients and an “assessment of the number of registered patients residing in the relevant area in relation to the capacity of the surrounding dispensary locations,” DOH said.

Licensed dispensaries are subject to numerous regulations and are fundamentally different from hemp retail stores, the department said.

Matayoshi, the House Consumer Protection and Commerce Committee chair, says regulation is not simply about protecting the network of dispensaries and affiliated production facilities the state has set up to produce and sell medical marijuana.

It’s also about protecting consumers from untested, hemp-based THC products previously sold by unlicensed retailers.

“There are products that have not been subject to the same rigorous testing that the medical marijuana requires,” he said.

Matayoshi also took issue with the federal government’s carving out low-THC hemp from its schedule of controlled substances, which includes marijuana.

“They try to draw a difference,” he said. “There’s not any. If hemp didn’t have the same effect people wouldn’t buy it.”

Federal Loophole Set To Close

Meanwhile, Alyas’s lawsuit remains alive in Honolulu federal court.

Among other claims, Alyas argues that Hawaiʻi’s law violates the U.S. Constitution’s supremacy clause by criminalizing hemp that Congress legalized. It also challenges the state’s law under a constitutional doctrine known as the “dormant commerce clause,” which limits states’ ability to pass laws interfering with interstate commerce.

Hawaiʻi Attorney General Anne Lopez’s (D) office has countered that the supremacy and dormant commerce clause arguments don’t apply and has asked the court to deny Alyas’s request for a court order preventing the state from enforcing the law.

The issues concerning Hawaiʻi’s low-THC hemp law soon may be moot. In 2025, President Trump signed a bill that redefines hemp, effectively closing the loophole in the farm bill that allowed for the wave of hemp-based THC products to flood the market.

The new measure was supposed to take effect in November, but the Senate passed a bill pushing the deadline back until December.

Beau Whitney, the Portland-based hemp market researcher, has been following Congress’s movements closely. He said the new hemp definition threatens the whole industry and could have unintended consequences for industrial hemp.

While some in Congress, including U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, have been pushing back, Whitney isn’t counting on those efforts to do anything, although he said, “There might be a diving catch.”

This story was first published by Honolulu Civil Beat.

Photo courtesy of Brian Shamblen.

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Harm reduction advocates fear these policies could make cigarettes comparatively more attractive just as Europe is struggling to meet its 2040 tobacco-free target. Recent interventions by EU member states suggest those concerns are no longer confined to consumers and advocacy organisations.

EU member states challenge proposed bans in Ireland and Poland

This reflects an important principle of EU regulation: when a government effectively removes much of a lawful product category, it should demonstrate why less restrictive alternatives—such as age restrictions, retailer licensing, advertising controls, product standards and nicotine limits—would be insufficient.

We have all the data needed to validate the need for flavours

This is particularly relevant to nicotine pouches. Tobacco-free pouches deliver nicotine without combustion, inhalation or tobacco leaf. Requiring such products to resemble tobacco in flavour could be counterproductive for former smokers deliberately trying to distance themselves from cigarettes. Poland undoubtedly has legitimate reasons to prevent youth nicotine use. The question is whether eliminating adult-oriented alternatives represents the most effective response.

A longitudinal study by Yale researchers found that adults who began using flavoured vapes were more likely subsequently to quit smoking than those using tobacco-flavoured products, although the observational design cannot establish that flavours themselves caused cessation.

This does not prove every European flavour restriction will produce the same result. It does, however, demonstrate why policymakers should examine unintended consequences rather than treating falling legal vape sales as synonymous with improved health

Europe wants a tobacco-free Generation. So why restrict alternatives to cigarettes?

That wording matters. A tobacco-free target is not inherently the same thing as a nicotine-free target. Vapes and nicotine pouches can contain nicotine without containing tobacco, while nicotine replacement products have delivered the same addictive substance therapeutically for decades.

Moreover, a 2025 Cochrane living systematic review highlighted a difficult policy paradox. Excessive restrictions on the regulated market may not eliminate demand. They can instead encourage consumers to seek illicit products—the very products for which quality, ingredients, nicotine concentrations and age controls are hardest to guarantee.

Tobacco-free or nicotine-free? When will they acknowledge the difference

But regulating presentation is different from eliminating the characteristics that make smoke-free alternatives acceptable to adults. The most effective framework would recognise a continuum of nicotine-related risk. Cigarettes should face the strongest regulatory and fiscal pressure because they cause the greatest harm. Lower-risk products should be tightly regulated for quality and youth access while remaining sufficiently affordable, accessible and appealing to compete with smoking. Ireland and Poland now have an opportunity to reconsider whether their proposals achieve that balance.

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