Cannabis—known locally as pakalolo—has a long history in Hawaii, both before and after criminalization at the federal level. As Lawrence Downes, a New York Times journalist from Hawaii, explained in an editorial for the paper in 2012:

Hawaii in the late ’70s was a land of artisanal home growers and farmers producing legendary strains like Maui Wowee and Puna Butter. Rolling Stone in 1979 called pakalolo Hawaii’s No. 1 crop, above sugar and pineapple. Its sickly sweet haze hung heavily over concerts and beaches, and there was a remarkable tolerance in the air, too.

Medical cannabis was legalized here rather early, in 2000, but Aloha Green and other dispensaries only secured licenses in the past year or so. It took that long for the state to authorize dispensaries.

Aloha Green is one of eight such dispensaries in the state, and one of three on Oahu, the island that’s home to the bulk of the state’s population. About 5,000 patients participate in Oahu’s medical-marijuana program, the only way to gain access to the dispensaries and their goods.

After the licensing, it took nearly a year for Aloha Green to actually open for business. In the interim, they were growing their own product—another requirement. Dispensaries can’t buy their pot from one another or other sources.

In a recent editorial, Chris Garth, the head of the Hawaii Dispensary Alliance, argued that this so-called vertical-integration mandate drives up prices and has limited cultivation on the island to just a few strains. If marijuana is considered medicine, this would be like going to a drugstore and finding just Vicks VapoRub and Pepto-Bismol on offer, he argued.

In an interview, Garth explained that he understands the public-safety reasons for controlling the plants from seeds to sale. Still, “the vertically oriented market is incredibly cumbersome when it comes to the costs of production,” he said.

These regulations make the pot at Hawaii’s dispensaries more expensive than it is in places where marijuana flows freely and recreationally, like Colorado or Washington State. (Customers can pay with cash or with CanPay, an app designed for cannabis retailers. Aloha Green doesn’t take regular credit cards.)

Cho, who doesn’t use cannabis herself, seemed drawn to the cannabis industry by these challenges. She worked in start-ups in New York before moving here—apparently the only thing as tough as venture capital in the big city is operating a marijuana store in paradise.

Dispensaries here are regulated by the health department. Cho speculated, nicely, that their bureaucratic overseers might be, well, a little square. “They all have very good intentions, but because they are upright citizens who’ve not done bad things, they don’t really know about cannabis culture and the way that it works,” she said. “Understandably, they haven’t ventured into it, because they are good citizens who don’t break the law.”