He Used to Bust Drug Boats. Now the Feds Are Coming for His Hemp Company.

Lukas Gilkey spent his early twenties intercepting drug shipments for the U.S. Coast Guard. He watched the war on drugs fail in real time. So he came home to Texas and built HomeTown Hero, a hemp company employing 150 people in a state where marijuana is still largely illegal. Now Washington is moving to ban what he built.

Lukas Gilkey’s path into cannabis began in the Caribbean Sea, in the early 2000s, as part of a U.S. Coast Guard counter-narcotics unit operating across international waters. He was about twenty years old at the time, assigned to intercept vessels suspected of transporting drugs moving north through Central America and Mexico.

Those operations placed him inside one of the most active corridors of the global drug trade. Boats were stopped, searched and dismantled to find cargo that would justify the political narratives built around enforcement, along with the public funding that continued to flow through them.

The work exposed him to trafficking and anti-narcotics logistics, and also to the broader illogical structure of enforcement.

“The things that I saw and just everything that came from the war on drugs was just completely idiotic.”

Lukas Gilkey, founder, HomeTown Hero

The conclusion came from repeated observation: interdictions did not appear to reduce the underlying flow of drugs. They were simply absorbed into it.

“Every time we busted it, they would just — they could theoretically just raise the price on the street and make the money back. It wasn’t a big deal.”

Lukas Gilkey, founder, HomeTown Hero

One episode remained particularly clear. Gilkey’s unit stopped a fishing vessel off the Mexican coast. While his team was searching it, another armed group arrived — locked and loaded, heavily equipped, organized and not part of their operation. A colleague reached for his 9mm. “Put that away, man.” They were largely overpowered, somewhere in the open sea. Then the low-level narcos on the fishing boat, who had been calm, began reacting. They went from wary to crying and begging for the U.S. Coast Guard to detain them.

The intercepting boat was operated by the Mexican naval forces. Gilkey recalls that the Coast Guard unit handed the vessel over and left.

After that episode, Gilkey decided it was enough. Enforcement, as it was structured, was not addressing the conditions that sustained the drug trade. It was causing more harm than it reduced.

It’s not a loop but a lifeline

After leaving the military, Gilkey moved into marketing, working in Los Angeles before returning to Texas. In 2015, he launched a headshop distribution company supplying retail stores in a state where marijuana remained illegal.

The turning point came with the 2018 Farm Bill. Hemp, defined as cannabis containing no more than 0.3% delta-9 THC by dry weight, became federally legal. That definition created a new category of cannabis operating under a different regulatory structure than marijuana. Gilkey moved into that space quickly. By 2019, his company was producing hemp-derived products, eventually becoming HomeTown Hero, the Texas-based company he now runs, with operations across manufacturing, distribution and retail. Today it employs roughly 150 people.

The model depends on how THC is measured. A detail — percentage by weight — allowed for products that remained technically compliant while still producing psychoactive effects. From there, a broader system emerged where hemp products could be sold online, shipped across state lines and processed through standard financial infrastructure. Many of the regulatory barriers that apply to marijuana — federal prohibition, DEA oversight, state licensing systems — do not apply in the same way to hemp.

“In the hemp industry you can take credit cards, ship products to your house legally. And as a user, you don’t have to be on a list.”

Lukas Gilkey, founder, HomeTown Hero

Two parallel cannabis markets now exist in the United States. One federally legal, scalable and relatively accessible. The other, state-legal marijuana, fragmented by nature, debt-dependent and still federally prohibited.

The Texas madness

The divergence between hemp and marijuana becomes particularly visible in Texas. The state’s Compassionate Use Program remains one of the most tightly constrained medical cannabis systems in the country, even after recent expansions. Access is limited to a defined list of qualifying conditions established in statute. Products are capped at low THC levels, with no legal access to smokable flower. Distribution is highly concentrated, with a small number of licensed organizations serving a large and geographically dispersed patient base.

Hemp, by contrast, has enabled a much broader market to emerge. According to the Whitney Economics report, the hemp-derived cannabinoid industry in Texas generates approximately $5.5 billion in revenue, with retail alone accounting for over $4.3 billion.

The broader footprint includes more than 53,000 jobs, around $2.1 billion in wages annually and roughly $267 million in tax revenue to the state. These figures help explain why hemp has become a central part of the cannabis economy in Texas, filling demand that the existing medical system does not meet while reaching an adult-use market that remains largely forbidden in the state.

That explosive growth has triggered a policy response — though not the one you might expect. Several states have moved to restrict or ban intoxicating hemp-derived cannabinoids, particularly delta-8 and hemp-derived delta-9 products. These efforts are often framed around safety and regulatory consistency, but they also align with the interests of licensed marijuana operators facing competition from a less regulated sector.

“You can’t exist in the California market without investors. It’s not profitable. But you can actually run a good business based on hemp products — you don’t need investors, and thousands of people have done it.”

Lukas Gilkey, founder, HomeTown Hero

Now, with the clock ticking, a federal ban set to take effect in November 2026 threatens an industry that, in Texas alone, supports more than 53,000 jobs and billions in economic activity. As every drug economist knows, restrictions on legal supply do not eliminate demand.

One direction or two

The bizarre logic Gilkey encountered at sea — enforcement reshaping markets in ways that make them barely recognizable — reappears in his view of current cannabis policy. Hemp and marijuana now operate as parallel systems with overlapping products and competing regulatory frameworks. The expansion of hemp has introduced a structural conflict the industry has not resolved.

“They’ve now turned into those people.”

Lukas Gilkey, founder, HomeTown Hero

The reference is to segments of the marijuana industry that now support restrictions on hemp-derived products — the same industry that spent decades arguing against prohibition. The disagreement reflects conflicting views on who can participate in the cannabis market, under what conditions and at what cost. As Gilkey sees it, hemp lowers entry barriers and expands access. Marijuana, as currently structured, concentrates participation among licensed operators with sufficient capital to navigate the system.

At the same time, the boundary between the two is beginning to shift. Some large marijuana companies have been incorporating hemp-derived products into their portfolios for years, using federal legality to reach consumers beyond state-regulated systems.

“If all the marijuana companies start doing hemp with us, that completely shifts the paradigm.”

Lukas Gilkey, founder, HomeTown Hero

Regulatory decisions at both the state and federal level will determine whether hemp remains a broad entry point into cannabis or becomes a narrowed category under tighter control. Gilkey is directly engaged in that process, spending significantly on lobbyists and lawyers alongside other hemp operators. But large cannabis companies, despite operating under tight margins or heavy debt loads, also have deep pockets and significant political influence.

Meanwhile, the business continues to operate, thriving in uncertainty.

“I think Jack Herer was right. Hemp is the future of cannabis in the U.S., and it’s the path forward.”

Lukas Gilkey, founder, HomeTown Hero