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Daily Smile

[{"type":"text","text":"Don't mind if I do..."}]

Smile 26 7 11

<title>Daily Smile: Saturday, July 11, 2026</title>

Don't mind if I do...

Daily Smile: Saturday, July 11, 2026

Christian Shimabuku Headshot

Christian Shimabuku

Sports

[{"type":"text","text":"LAS VEGAS — Grand opening, grand closing. "}]

That's the plan for the two Hawai‘i fighters at UFC 329 on Saturday night. 

Wai‘anae's Max Holloway (27-9) will take on Conor McGregor (22-6) in the main event

 of one of the organization's most anticipated cards in years. 

The preliminary card, which starts at 1 p.m. HST, kicks off with Kamehameha alumnus and Pearl City native Kai Kamaka III (18-7-1) looking to be the first blemish on Englishman Luke Riley's 13-0 record. 

"(Fight) camp was good. It was a long camp, and I got to plan it out well," Kamaka told Aloha State Daily in a recent interview. "I'm excited for this fight."

Kamaka debuted in the UFC on Aug. 15, 2020, scoring a $50,000 Fight of the Night bonus after defeating Tony Kelley via unanimous decision. It was around that time that he relocated from O‘ahu to Las Vegas in full pursuit of his MMA dreams. 

Kamaka went 1-2-1 in the UFC before signing a free agent contract with Bellator in 2021. After Bellator merged with the PFL in 2023, Kamaka reached the PFL featherweight semifinals before losing a split decision to Brendan Loughnane. From there, Kamaka went 3-1 in regional promotion Tuff-N-Uff. His perseverance was rewarded when he signed another UFC contract, scoring a victory over Dakota Hope at UFC Vegas 115 on April 4. 

"I appreciate everything that brought me here, getting to the UFC the first time and being worthy enough to come back again," Kamaka said. "That's a hard feat, but I appreciate all the experience I acquired when I left. A lot of high-level experience. I still had the hunger to come back, but I was still chasing my own goal of being a great martial artist, and I got to do that outside the UFC."

Never one to back down from a challenge, it was Kamaka who asked UFC brass for the chance to take on Riley. 

"I asked for Luke Riley. (UFC matchmaker) Sean Shelby asked the names I'd be interested in, and I gave him that name. I thought it was a good prospect, somebody who hasn't really been tested yet but lot of steam behind him, so I thought that was the upside that I had in that fight."

The featherweight fight between Kamaka and Riley became official at Friday's weigh-ins, as both fighters came in at the non-championship limit of 146 pounds. 

Given UFC 329's Las Vegas location and Holloway's presence in the main event, a sizable Hawai‘i contingent of fans are expected to be in attendance at the fight. In sharing a card with Holloway for the first time, Kamaka understands the magnitude of the moment and wants to be the islander that starts the night off the right way. 

"Very motivating," Kamaka said of being on the same card as Holloway. "It's like the best situation possible for a kid in Hawai‘i. Every kid in Hawai‘i would probably wish they could be on a Max Holloway card, right? I get to do it on a card that he gets to have a rematch against one of the biggest stars in the game. I'm going to be living my dream, living a bucket list moment next weekend, and I get to do it in pretty much the biggest home game you can have, so it's pretty cool. I'm excited for it.

"There were young kids that probably wish they could fight on a 

 card. Young Mexicans probably wish they could fight in a Canelo Alvarez card, kids probably wish they could fight on a Floyd (Mayweather Jr.) card, and I get to do that with an icon of our Hawaiian culture. I'm super excited to do it, and I'm trying to become a star that night, too."

Sharing a card with Holloway will be a nice moment for Kamaka. The ultimate reward? Sharing the moment with his wife, Amber, and their five children. 

"I've been doing this my whole life, since I was a little kid. Shoot, ups and downs, I wouldn't be doing anything else," Kamaka said. "To have my family, it kind of goes hand in hand. They get to see me come back through adversity in different ways, different promotions, and make it back to a big moment, an iconic moment, to where this is probably going to be one of the biggest events, maybe of their lifetime right now, at least. 

"For us to kind of share that moment together is pretty cool. I get to teach them a lot of life lessons through fighting. Luckily, I'm good enough to where I can overcome a lot of adversity, and they can see me overcome different obstacles throughout my career. I would say they get to learn how to work hard, to be resilient, to chase after something through fighting. Luckily it's my job, luckily it's something that I grew up doing. It's a blessing."

For the latest news of Hawai‘i, sign up 

Kai Kamaka III 071026

<title>Kai Kamaka III looks to set the tone for Hawai‘i at UFC 329</title>

The Kamehameha alumnus and Pearl City native will kick off the UFC 329 preliminary card against Luke Riley on Saturday.

Kai Kamaka III looks to set the tone for Hawai‘i at UFC 329

Katie Helland Headshot

Katie Helland

Business & Tourism

Arts & Entertainment

Disney’s live action adaptation of “Moana,” 

filmed for nine days on Oʻahu and sails into theaters on Friday, July 10. 

"Moana" generated around $39 million in estimated economic impact for Hawaiʻi, said Georja Skinner, the chief officer of the creative industries division of the Department of Business, Economic Development & Tourism. That number includes money spent on labor, vendors, contractors, transportation, and more.

“First of all, having a major production in Hawaiʻi does so many things, not just with the spend and the jobs that it generates, but also the on-the-job learning experience from being on major productions like this,” Skinner told Aloha State Daily. “And that's what helps inform our own local creative economy and our local content development, which is a big focus of our department going forward.”

aia as Moana and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson — who was the voice of Maui in the original animated films — as the demigod. The 115-minute movie is directed by Thomas Kail.

Auliʻi Cravalho, the voice of the animated heroine in “Moana” and “Moana 2” is one of the executive producers of this movie.

The movie had 560 local resident hires, and 185 non-resident hires, Skinner said. Those hires have 39 job categories and include accountants, actors, production office support, special effects, stunts, transportation and on-set teachers.

Pre-production for "Moana" was comprised of 280 days of work over three years: 2022, 2023 and 2024, Skinner said. Work was halted by strikes in 2023.

The release of the live action “Moana” comes during the same week as Gov. Josh Green signing 

, which amends the motion picture, digital media and film production tax credit to allow a 

5% increase to current tax credit rates for productions that film on Oʻahu and Neighbor Islands, if at least 80% of the hires are local

. The new legislation will bring the tax credit rates up to 27% on Oʻahu, and 32% on Neighbor Islands.

Filmmakers and movie industry professionals as well as politicians hope the new tax credits will make Hawaiʻi a more economically enticing place to make movies.

The legislation expands the tax credits to cover not just movies and television series but streaming platforms, such as Netflix and Apple TV. The total tax credits for all productions in a year will increase to $60 million, up from the current $50 million cap. If the 

total tax credits for a year exceed the cap, they may be claimed in the following year

, a clause that sunsets on Dec. 31, 2037. 

Independent producers and studios are already calling.

“We've had a ton of calls,” Skinner said. “From the moment that the bill signing happened — and before that — people were very interested in how it works, not just people that are coming in with a new project, but those that were on the ground this year that are still coming in, and those that are working with us now to make sure that they can qualify for the certain aspects and all of that good stuff.”

The legisislation stipulates that these new tax credits apply retroactively to costs incurred by productions filmed after Dec. 31, 2025, if these productions had at least 80% local hires. So far, in 2026, several large productions have filmed in the state including “Protecting Jared,” “Jumanji 3,” and Season 2 of the Netflix series “Untamed.” 

In the future, Disney has also announced 

 a second live action movie, which would follow 

an earlier production that filmed entirely on Oʻahu

Want a chance to win tickets to Disney’s live action adaptation of the animated film? 

For the latest news of Hawai‘i, sign up 

Catherine Lagaʻaia

<title>What are the economic impacts of 'Moana' for Hawaiʻi?</title>

When a Disney movie has nine days of filming on Oʻahu and 280 more days of pre-production, there are economic impacts for the state. Georja Skinner, chief officer of the Creative Industries Division for the state’s Department of Business, Economic Development & Tourism, shared some numbers.

What are the economic impacts of 'Moana' for Hawaiʻi?

Square Mike Brestovansky Headshot RGZ3736 Large

Michael Brestovansky

Government & Politics

A now-retracted paper on solar energy offered "nothing serious" for discussions about the future of energy on O‘ahu, the state's chief energy officer said.

Last month, the University of Hawai‘i Economic Research Organization published a paper about how O‘ahu will meet electrical demand through 2050 while also transitioning to net zero carbon emissions.

In particular, the paper posited that extensive solar power development on O‘ahu is sufficient to meet the island’s projected power needs, and that plans for additional fuel-burning power plants — such as, 

, a liquid natural gas facility proposed by Japanese company JERA — are less cost-effective and less energy-efficient than solar buildout.

On Tuesday, the paper’s lead author Michael Roberts 

 the study following criticisms about its methodology and data from the Hawai‘i State Energy Office and Gov. Josh Green.

Mark Glick, chief energy officer of the HSEO, told Aloha State Daily that the paper was favorable to solar energy to a reasonable degree. 

“There are a lot of players that are looking at this system and agree that there need to be major and not incremental changes,” Glick said. “And we’re kind of wondering why some people are proposing solutions that almost perpetuate the status quo, when we know it needs to change.”

Glick said the report's supposition that an island-wide energy grid could operate primarily with solar and batteries and with a minimum of new sources of "firm" energy — reliable sources of electricity that are unlikely to be interrupted, such as power plants — is drastically at odds with reality.

"I would say, that is not a common sort of engineering practice," Glick said, before amending his statement: "It's not 'not a common practice,' it's not a practice, it's not utilized anywhere."

The HSEO released on Wednesday a review of the paper enumerating its various inaccuracies and poor assumptions, such as the paper’s “centerpiece assumption” that O‘ahu can simply increase its utility-scale solar generation twelvefold by building solar infrastructure across about 31,500 acres.

“The … report appears to treat the hardest constraint in Hawai‘i as though it were a secondary implementation issue,” the HSEO review read, adding that such a colossal buildout of solar infrastructure would face resistance every step of the way. “Land use is not a minor implementation detail in Hawai‘i; it is often the central constraint.”

The HSEO also challenged the paper’s estimates on the cost of solar procurement — drawn from 2018-2019 data instead of more recent and expensive figures — and its interpretation of the projected cost of JERA’s LNG plant.

The energy office’s report also found the paper made unsupported claims about the JERA facility’s projected emission rates, while overestimating the durability and resilience of not only its imagined all-solar infrastructure, but also the island’s existing oil-burning power plants, on which that solar infrastructure would rely during the buildout.

The HSEO report concluded with 56 unanswered questions about the paper’s findings, and warned that the paper’s conclusions “may be true only within the model’s assumptions.”

Glick noted that the paper heavily relies on contributions by one Matthias Fripp, an energy industry researcher with 

 to an environmental NGO with a history of lobbying against the JERA plan. The paper specifically cites a pair of papers Fripp co-authored several times, and includes a brief acknowledgement thanking him for “his contributions to [the] report,” a gesture not granted to any other person cited.

Glick said Fripp’s previous assertions about JERA — including a claim in March that the HSEO erroneously presented the costs of JERA to be $1.2 billion less than reality — have been “clearly false,” and “fiction.”

With the paper now rescinded — a UH Mānoa statement claims Roberts withdrew the paper to correct identified errors, complete a comprehensive review, seek additional input and feedback from stakeholders” before republishing a revised draft — its potential impacts on future energy discussion remain to be seen. But Glick said he was surprised the paper got that far at all.

“UHERO has had a long history of providing credible and generally unbiased information that has helped inform,” Glick said. “But this clearly does not fit into the level of that kind of product.”

UHERO is reviewing its publication standards, according to a UH statement released Tuesday.

"The findings and conclusions in any UHERO publication are those of its authors, not of UHERO or the University of Hawaiʻi," the statement read. "UHERO does not take positions on policy questions. UHERO’s role is to provide the evidence and analysis that decision-makers and the public need, not to advocate for particular outcomes."

Meanwhile, JERA still seeks permits to begin development of its planned 500-megawatt LNG facility in Kapolei.

 For the latest news of Hawai‘i, sign up 

Image0 16x9

<title>State energy office slams retracted UHERO solar energy report</title>

State energy officer Mark Glick said the now-withdrawn report was unrealistic, unserious and unsupported by data.

State energy office slams retracted UHERO solar energy report

Crime & Courts

A civil complaint alleging that Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke violating campaign spending laws will go to the state Attorney General for potential prosecution.

Last week, the Hawai‘i Campaign Spending Commission published a 

 accusing Luke and her campaign team of 12 different violations of campaign finance laws during the 2022 election.

On Wednesday, the Commission moved to refer their complaint to the state office of the Attorney General, which is already conducting a separate investigation into financial impropriety by Luke, tied to the infamous 

 that was the subject of an FBI investigation.

The commission’s complaint accuses Luke, her husband Michael Luke, campaign treasurers Emmanuel Zibakalam, Leodoloff Asuncion Jr., and Matthew Sasaki, deputy treasurer Kalowena Komeiji, and the Friends of Sylvia Luke of mishandling campaign funds.

The complaint includes allegations that Luke signed checks for her candidate committee instead of a treasurer, that her treasurers signed checks for the committee despite no longer being listed as treasurers — some of which were to the former treasurers themselves — and that the group failed to accurately report campaign expenditures to the commission.

The complaint concluded with two options: either the Commission concludes that a violation of law likely took place and refer the matter to the Attorney General; or the Commission makes its own preliminary determination, fines Luke and her associates $28,300 and orders them to correct their campaign spending reports within 20 days. 

On Wednesday, the Commission voted for the former option. The vote was unanimous, although Commission Vice Chair Danton Wong recused himself from proceedings Wednesday, citing a conflict of interest based on prior donations he made to Luke.

Eunice Park, general counsel for the Commission, said the extent of the alleged impropriety cannot be attributed to technical errors, particularly given Luke’s extensive political career. She said Luke had “ample opportunity” to correct the violations in the four years since her election, but did not.

Attorney David Louie, who represents Luke and the Friends of Sylvia Luke, spoke briefly before the Commission, but only to decline comment.

Fellow Attorney Randall Hironaka, representing Michael Luke, Komeiji and Sasaki, asked the Commission if his clients could be left off the complaint because, he said, the complaint does not allege any criminal activity by his clients, merely that untoward activity was made without their authorization.

Nonetheless, Park told Hironaka that it will be up to the Attorney General to determine the criminality of anyone named in the complaint.

Luke’s campaign finances from 2022 have come under heavy scrutiny this year as fallout continues from an FBI corruption investigation.

That investigation had previously alleged that former Hawai‘i Rep. Ty Cullen — who had turned informant for the agency — oversaw a transaction between an unknown man and “an influential state legislator” involving the $35,000 in 2022. In February, Luke denied any involvement in that transaction, but admitted that she had accepted two $5,000 checks during a 2022 dinner with former Cullen.

That admission — Luke claimed she never cashed the checks, but never reported the contributions — led to further investigations of Luke’s 2022 campaign finances. In the midst of the furor, Luke 

 in April she will not run for reelection this year, and days later 

 she would take an indefinite leave of absence, which has continued to this day.

DavidLouie

<title>State AG to investigate alleged Sylvia Luke campaign finance violations</title>

A complaint by the Campaign Spending Commission alleging 12 campaign finance violations has been referred to the state Attorney General for possible prosecution.

State AG to investigate alleged Sylvia Luke campaign finance violations

Alika Garcia

Alika Peleholani Garcia

Viewpoints

Aloha Spirit

As a first responder during the recent Kona Low storms, I know that addressing the impact of natural disasters on human beings comes first: getting people to safety, protecting their homes when possible, and helping them begin the long road to recovery.

But when the rains stop and the flood waters settle, I wear another hat as the executive director of 

. In this role, I can see the otherwise unseen impact of such storms below the ocean’s surface and the way that extreme weather is affecting our nearshore reefs — and the long-term cost of this damage to our communities.

After the Kona Lows were over, I went underwater and saw it clearly: a thousand corals torn loose, flipped, or shattered by storm surge waves and flood debris. And that was just a tiny portion of the reef that encircles our entire island.

Across Oʻahu and throughout our pae ʻāina, the damage is real and widespread.

When corals are ripped out, we lose more than coral — we lose shelter for reef life, habitat for fish, and part of the reef’s natural ability to take the punch out of waves before they reach our shoreline. That loss affects our food systems, livelihoods and community health.

While repairing portions of the reef after the Kona Low damage, Kuleana Coral Restoration recently reached a milestone: 10,000 corals planted and repaired. The number is worth celebrating, but only if we understand what it represents.

A reef is not just coral. A reef is a community: fish moving through structure, crabs sheltering in crevices, shrimp flashing in and out of shade. When coral survives, it becomes structure and structure invites life back. That’s the neighborhood returning.

But we hold a firm truth alongside the celebration: planting corals is not enough by itself. Corals live within a system shaped by what happens above them. In Hawaiʻi, our reefs sit at the ma kai end of the water cycle where everything collects.

Mauka to makai water carries life. It also carries consequences. Our corals live downstream of our choices; what we allow to happen upstream affects the lived conditions for our reefs downstream. A Kona Low is an acute example of that connection, with damage to the land and stress underwater arriving together.

That connection can feel like a mirror of community health, especially for Kānaka communities trying to persist in a modern world that wasn’t built with our best interests in mind. Reefs get smothered, stressed, and pushed by forces bigger than any single organism can solve alone — not unlike the way that our people experience the socio-economic pressures that keep us from thriving in our homeland or that drive us away.

Coral restoration matters because coral is living architecture. It is housing underwater. When reef structure collapses, the smallest relatives lose shelter first. Planting and repairing corals helps rebuild that structure so life can return.

But just like housing on land, simply building more homes doesn’t solve the housing crisis. If the systemic forces that push families out remain unchanged, the crisis continues. Reefs face the same reality. If upstream pressures don’t change, coral planting becomes temporary.

However, “upstream” doesn’t mean “out of our control.” It means that changes must be made earlier in the system; what we choose, what we tolerate, what we prioritize, and what we build together. Durable reef recovery comes when we align coral restoration work in the ocean with actionable mālama ʻāina, from working to ensure that our freshwater streams are cleaner to making smarter shoreline decisions and everything in between.

And the urgency is growing. With oceans trending warmer and the possibility of a strong El Niño pattern this year, coral bleaching and more damaging storms become more likely.

When reefs are already weakened they can’t slow waves as well, and storms can hit our coastline harder. That’s why preparation matters: ready crews, ready communities, and a shared plan to respond both above and below sea level.

Planting 10,000 corals is not a finish line. It’s a beginning: repairing the reef neighborhood while strengthening the human community that protects it.

[{"type":"text","text":"By restoring reefs, our eldest kūpuna, we restore ourselves."}]

This article is reprinted with permission from 

OHA's Ka Wai Ola newspaper: "By Restoring Our Reefs We Restore Ourselves" by Alika Peleholani Garcia, in its June 2026 issue, Vol. 43 No. 6. Read more at 

Reef Repair Project2

Hau‘oli Lorenzo-Elarco and Kenika Lorenzo-Elarco

Hawai‘i History

Rather than framing ocean protection as a burden, we should instead ask why Pacific Island peoples, and our protected and sacred oceans, are forced to bear the unfair burden of industrial fishing, write two members of the Papahānaumokuākea Native Hawaiian Cultural Working Group.

Fishing Nets

Community Voices: Commercial fishing is not a cultural practice

Philamer Felicitas

Marine debris from lost or discarded commercial fishing nets to plastic and other waste carried to the ocean by streams, rivers and lakes, does not simply disappear at sea. Much of the debris collected in the massive Great Pacific Garbage Patch north of Hawaiʻi eventually converges on our shores — especially in Papahānaumokuākea National Marine Sanctuary. Despite relatively little of this waste originating in Hawaiʻi, our local community continues bearing the responsibility of ongoing cleanup efforts to protect one of the most sacred and ecologically significant places on Earth.

Marine Debris KWO Cover

Community Voices: What preserving Papahānaumokuākea means below the surface

<title>Community Voices: By Restoring Our Reefs We Restore Ourselves</title>

When corals are ripped out, we lose more than coral — we lose shelter for reef life, habitat for fish, and part of the reef’s natural ability to take the punch out of waves before they reach our shoreline. That loss affects our food systems, livelihoods and community health, says Alika Peleholani Garcia, executive director of Kuleana Coral Restoration.

Community Voices: By Restoring Our Reefs We Restore Ourselves

Kam Napier Headshot

A. Kam Napier

Columnists

If you’re a street junkie, shooting up heroin in Chinatown, the State of Hawai‘i has your back. It’ll take our tax dollars and turn them into clean needles, so you can keep on shooting safely.

Fentanyl addict? Go for it! Chances are you’ll never get busted for public intoxication (though it’s a crime), or possession (a crime), and if you overdose, the state will once again turn tax dollars into Narcan to save your life. All your emergency rooms visits? Not to worry! “The people” have you covered with their tax dollars and inflated insurance premiums.

If you’re an alcoholic, the State of Hawai‘i just doesn’t care. Legislators drink, after all, they’re not going to go after their own Heineken and Merlot. Just don’t drink and drive, that’s the only area where we see public policy put any time and money. Everyone seems perfectly confident that ID checks at the liquor store are keeping booze out of the hands of children.

Love pot? Lucky you live Hawai‘i! Hawai‘i loves pot and Hawai‘i loves you! It’s de facto legal, based on how often you can smell pot in the open. And it’s trivially easy to go the law-abiding medical marijuana route. Tell a doctor you’re anxious, get a prescription and it’s off the pot pharmacy you go. Enjoy! After all, we’ve hashed this issue out for years now and all sensible people agree that drug prohibitions never work. You have to respect people’s choices and just legalize and tax their habit.

But if you’re a smoker who’d like to quit smoking cigarettes by going to a safer but similar alternative, this same State of Hawai‘i has just two words.

, Gov. Josh Green just signed a law that as of January 1, 2027, will ban “99.9% of disposable vapes” in Hawai‘i. Flanked by public health officials and the obligatory Child For Whom We Do This, he positively beamed with pride.

Over what, exactly? Doctor Governor Green should be aware that if harm reduction works for hard drugs, it certainly does with nicotine. The UK’s NHS (formerly known as the National Health Service), which is beloved by American Democrats as an ideal model of universal health care, has 

“In recent years, e-cigarettes have become a very popular stop smoking aid in the UK. Also known as vapes or e-cigs, they're far less harmful than cigarettes, and can help you quit smoking for good. … Many thousands of people in the UK have already stopped smoking with the help of an e-cigarette. There's evidence that they can be effective. A 2021 review found people who used e-cigarettes to quit smoking, as well as having expert face-to-face support, can be up to twice as likely to succeed as people who used other nicotine replacement products, such as patches or gum.”

Our reporter asked Green about that. He replied with skepticism, saying, “The biggest problem has been getting an entire generation … innumerable middle schoolers and high schoolers hooked,” Green said. “Society has found ways to quit traditional cigarettes through medical means, through behavioral techniques; we should lean on those.”

Does he even hear himself? He said this while signing an e-cig prohibition law. Not medical means, not behavioral techniques, no, just the ban hammer. Meanwhile, actual tobacco cigarettes, the really dangerous ones we didn’t ban, remain perfectly available.

Then Green put Lola Irvin on the spot for further comment on our question. Irvin is administrator of the state Department of Health’s Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion Division. As we reported, she said adults who have concurrently used traditional cigarettes and e-cigarettes are less likely to successfully quit smoking, while young people who begin using e-cigarettes are more likely to transition to smoking traditional cigarettes.

[{"type":"text","text":"So much for harm reduction!"}]

Irvin seems unaware of the NHS findings I shared above about people successfully using e-cigs to quit tobacco cigarettes or reduce their intake. There are other studies.

Efficacy and Safety of E-Cigarette Use for Smoking Cessation: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials

,” for example, published in 2023 at The American Journal of Medicine. Conclusion: “Nicotine e-cigarettes were associated with increased smoking abstinence in comparison with non-nicotine e-cigarettes. Furthermore, nicotine and non-nicotine e-cigarettes increased abstinence compared with conventional smoking cessation therapies, and the absolute risk of [Serious Adverse Events] was low across all trials. Overall, these data suggest e-cigarettes appear to be more efficacious than conventional nicotine replacement or behavioral smoking cessation therapies.”

, published last November. “Nicotine e-cigarettes can help people to stop smoking for at least six months,” it concludes. “Evidence shows they work better than nicotine replacement therapy, and probably better than e-cigarettes without nicotine. They may work better than no support, or behavioral support alone, and may not be associated with serious unwanted effects.”

As for her arguments that e-cigs and vaping makes teenagers more likely to take up smoking real tobacco cigarettes, there are indeed studies that find teens given to try vices will try both vaping and smoking, sometimes in that order, sometimes the other way around. These studies find they’ll often also try pot and booze.

When you measure what youths actually do, however, the astonishing and wonderful fact is that 

peaked in 1997 at 36.4%, considerably higher than the adult rate that year of 24.7%. By 2021, the youth smoking rate dropped to just 3.8%, well below the adult rate of 11.5%.

That’s an 86% decline in just 24 years, across all ethnicities, sexes and grade levels.

And it has dropped even more since then, despite the arrival of e-cigs and vaping. As of 2024, according to the 

, just 1.4% of high school students reported any use of tobacco cigarettes.

, found that from 2022 to 2025, e-cigarette and tobacco cigarette use among youth further declined while nicotine pouch use remained low and stable.

In other words, we won the war on youth smoking, without any prohibitions at all. When our governor says that "an entire generation … innumerable middle schoolers and high schoolers" have just been "hooked" on nicotine, he is flat out lying. The exact opposite is true. 

Rather than declare victory and keep on with existing, obviously effective policies, Hawai‘i snatched a crisis from the jaws of success and enacted this ban.

Because they did so in part to “protect our keiki,” they had a student speak at yesterday's press conference, Maya Butts. The bathrooms at her school, Kalaheo High School, she said have become just “places to vape.”

That’s surely against school rules and is certainly already illegal, so this sounds like an enforcement problem to me. Except the enforcers failed to uphold existing law. Then she said:

“I’ve watched my smart, athletic friends completely lose their motivation. They got hooked on these devices that taste like candy, move on to other substances, then lose their spark altogether.”

I hate to break it to Butts, but if vaping makes her schoolmates lethargic and lazy, they aren’t vaping nicotine. They’re vaping pot.

But the ban is about more than health and protecting kids, Green said, and the text of the legislation argues. It’s about protecting the environment. In each disposable vape is a battery and these batteries are getting into the environment, they asserted, without data.

Setting aside the fact that I’ve never seen the gutters lined with thrown-away vapes the way one used to see cigarette butts, I’ll just note that this is the same state government that is forcing us to import batteries by the tons for our carbon-free solar future. A half-ton battery in every EV. Batteries the size of a Matson cargo container for the solar farms. All with no plan for their disposal or recycling.

OK, so if you dig into facts and find that there is no youth smoking crisis, and the stated rationalizations for the ban range from transparently bogus to logically inconsistent, what’s really going on here?

[{"type":"text","text":"Class warfare, that’s what."}]

Vaping nicotine is, by and large, a lower-middle class and working-class vice. Construction laborers, single moms working two or three jobs, people who ride the bus. People who rent. They have ambitions and aspirations constantly thwarted by Hawai‘i high cost of living and ridiculously unnecessary housing shortage.

They’re tired, they’re stressed. They turned, at some point in their lives, to Kool Milds and Marlboro Lights to deal with it all. They know smoking is bad, though, but quitting is hard. Smoking is a pleasure, it’s a consolation. It both calms anxiety and sharpens concentration.

Then, miracle of miracles, technology gave them a better choice. Tobacco-free nicotine they can inhale for the same soothing, sensual pleasures they got from smoking, with none of the known carcinogens, none of the pilau smell.

On the other hand, we have the upper-middle class and those who aspire to that status. Your governors, legislators, health department careerists and high school faculty. People with social capital and clout, if not vast wealth beyond the equity in their home that they own. Few to none of these white-collar, college-educated professionals ever smoked, or quit years ago. They know better.

[{"type":"text","text":"They took one look at vaping and thought, in unison:"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"“That looks stupid. That looks tacky. That looks low-class.”"}]

That’s it. That’s the whole mindset. All the people who pushed this ban won’t say it, because they know how it sounds. No one wants to be seen as a snob and a Karen, they want to hide that. So they prop up children as human shields, gin up a non-existent crisis and use health and the environment as fig leaves.

On Tuesday, Hawai‘i Gov. Josh Green signed into law a ban on "99.9% of disposable vapes." It's a move totally at odds with the harm reduction strategies the state uses for all other vices, argues ASD Editor in Chief A. Kam Napier. And it's in response to a non-existent crisis, in that teen smoking and vaping is the lowest it's ever been in a quarter century.

Daily Smile: Saturday, July 11, 2026

ASD Staff

Reporter

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