“We make our own whiskey and our own smoke, too.”
—Ol’ Bocephus, the third-best Hank Williams

At the risk of agreeing with ol’ Bocephus up there — multi-instrumentalist savant turned reactionary buffoon — well, I gotta agree with ol’ Bocephus up there. We do indeed make our own whiskey and our own smoke. Or, at least, we can if we decide we want to, subsequently put our minds and mettle to it, and are willing to accept the fact we may well wind up in jail — prison, actually, not jail — if we get caught doing it. And these are two substances — hemp and hooch, weed and whiskey — that are legal in the state of Arkansas. 

You know, mostly.

As ever and always necessary when writing about the pretty ridiculous medical marijuana law we have on the books here in Arkansas, a disclaimer: Anything is better than nothing, and the less people we lock up for buying or selling or smoking weed, the better. And, at the risk of agreeing, in the same column, with both Bocephus and the most annoying dude on your dorm floor freshman year (probably), let’s just all accept that the fact marijuana was ever illegal in the first place at all, to any degree, is really, really dumb. Ergo, our sorta-dumb law that sorta-kinda makes weed legal has cleared the bar, however low, to be a genuine improvement. 

But the fact that Arkansas’s medical marijuana regulations omit a grow-your-own provision is tantamount to travesty. Goes against the whole spirit of the enterprise, unless we pretend that medical marijuana is only valuable inasmuch as it treats, directly, a very specific condition in an individual and that there are no incidental benefits to be had through the loosening of onerous restrictions on personal choice and horticultural liberty, or that maybe the growing of a plant itself by a patient might be inherently therapeutic. A big argument against the grow-your-own provision (supposedly) is that it would be easy for a — gasp — non-card holder to get away with (*checks notes*) growing an otherwise-permissible plant. 

Would a grow-your-own provision encourage violation of whatever restriction(s) the state would place on cultivation — gotta have a card, be a caregiver for a patient with a card, etc.? Sure, at least as much as any other industry restrictions beg to be broken. But this is Arkansas, a state full of scofflaws in a nation founded by the same, and never a place where the illegality of a thing has hindered its production overmuch. And that being said, I’ll cede a point to our statewide editorial board of record here, whose years-long campaign to stand athwart the coming decriminalization regime and shout, “Stop!” was, while wrong-headed and comically alarmist, very much spot-on in one aspect: Medical marijuana was always going to be a stalking horse for full legalization, if not for the true medical-access evangelists then at least for the rest of us in the stressed-out peanut gallery. Yep, fellas, you got us. Had us clocked from the get-go.

You can still take your aw-shucks, why-do-you-think-they-call-it-dope country-lawyer routine and shove it, though, ya bunch of sanctimonious cornpone squares. Fine bunch of free-market conservatives you turned out to be. 

Regardless, there aren’t many things that would make me vote against wider access to marijuana, the fact I do not partake (anymore) notwithstanding. But the gross display of greed inherent in the last recreational bill that came up for a vote sure enough did the trick. Listen, greed is rarely good and it’s never pretty, but it takes a special kind of grubby rapacity — faux-populist in the streets, hedge-fund weasel in the sheets — to float a bill purporting to expand adult choice while simultaneously disallowing backyard agriculture (in Arkansas!) and also handing most of the new licenses for growing operations to the big outfits that already hold exclusive rights to major grow operations on the medical side. 

It’s not only greedy, it betrays a pretty significant lack of understanding, or maybe just a lack of interest, in the very business these goons look to dominate. If you possess a license to grow marijuana at commercial scale, and you are worried about Joe Six-Joint down the holler growing a few plants of his own so that he doesn’t have to drive to town every other week and buy your little glass jar of … ugh, flower, I guess we’re calling it now … then I just don’t know what to tell you. 

Actually, I do: Growing weed is easy, but growing good weed is hard.

You know how easy it is to grow weed, just like literally grow it? So easy a child could do it. I know that because I grew it when I was a child. (An older child, granted, like a teenager, but still.) I’m actually not sure if it would’ve been any good or not (but, for real, it wouldn’t’ve) because my partner in crime volunteered to put our little grow set-up in his room — we knew about grow rooms because the same adolescent black market that could get you a worn-out copy of Playboy in those days could, if worked just right, also yield the occasional High Times. His mother promptly busted our stupid, stupid asses. 

At a damned sleepover, no less, as we plotted which part of the woods behind his house would be our little green goldmine. Not the proudest moment for an aspiring hillbilly cartel. 

That wasn’t my last foray into the world of guerilla agriculture, and some of my subsequent ones were much more successful, but even the really good ones were still beset by interminable wait times, a rotating cast of the very worst and most annoying characters you’re ever likely to meet, any number of other mundane but infuriating problems particular to the world of, you know, gardening, and of course the crippling paranoia that comes from the constant fear of arrest and imprisonment. 

A grow-your-own provision in marijuana law — even just medical marijuana; I’m a reasonable guy and all for incremental change — can absolutely alleviate one of those problems. The last one, arguably the most significant of the lot. But it absolutely doesn’t change the other ones. (OK, maybe the cast-of-character one, too, I guess, but don’t count on it; stoners and other assorted drug people do not have a monopoly on grating personalities or general assholery.) Look, tomatoes are legal to buy and grow, and that doesn’t stop any but the most militant and annoying tomato aficionados and DIYers from going to the grocery store. 

Tomatoes (good ones) are hard to grow too, you see, and while I might prefer my homegrown ones — I do, for the record — I also like to eat them off-season, and in greater quantities than I might happen to have. Sometimes I just screw up my tomato plants and want a tomato anyway. Big Tomato and Edward’s Cash Saver are gonna be just fine, trust me, as would Big Weed if Arkansans were allowed to dabble in the occasional act of backyard green thumbery. 

Same thing with whiskey, by the way, to bring us back to Bocephus. Along with farmers, my family tree is lousy with moonshiners and degenerate drinkers, and I was well along the path of the latter when I decided to dabble in the former. Much like weed, whiskey is relatively simple to create, but an incredible pain in the ass to craft well. I mean, I had a still built right there in town (got a fellow booze enthusiast with a knack for tinkering to fix up a smokeless rig, very sneaky if I do say so myself), and yet believe me when I tell you: my purveyor of spirits did not suffer a drop in sales even in the prime of my successful enterprise. 

I mean, I’m pretty sure I walked to the liquor store at least once while the damned thing was running a batch. 

The difference here is that, while distilling spirits at your house is technically a felony here in Arkansas, I’m pretty sure the cops don’t care and I’m positive the big distillers don’t. They know good and well your whiskey sucks and theirs is good. They have scale, you have a hobby. 

So really, I don’t begrudge the big growers their profit margins. I just can’t respect someone with that kind of juice running up the score. Not very sporting! Forget your raggedy copy of High Times, boss, you gotta be a scientist to even get off the ground in today’s marijuana industry. I mean, I got farming in my blood, guerilla and otherwise, but that stuff they’re growing today doesn’t even have any seeds. It’s not natural, I tell you. 

Now, if I can only remember where I buried that still.