His marijuana advocacy has been one of the most sustained public commitments of his career: he has served on the advisory board of NORML — the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws — since approximately 2003, and he was arrested in Kentucky in 1996 for planting hemp seeds, a prosecution that ended in acquittal. The advocacy is connected to his interest in industrial hemp as an environmental material — hemp as a substitute for wood pulp in paper production, for petrochemical-based fabrics, for a range of industrial applications — as well as to his belief in the personal freedom of adult citizens to make their own choices about substances.
He has described his political philosophy as anarchist, using the term to mean specifically a skepticism toward centralized political authority and a belief in voluntary cooperation over coerced compliance. This is a political position with a specific intellectual history — the tradition that runs from Proudhon and Kropotkin through Emma Goldman and beyond — and it is not the same as the casual use of “anarchy” to mean chaos or the absence of order. Whether his philosophical commitments are fully worked out in the technical sense of that tradition or are better understood as a temperamental orientation toward individual freedom and away from institutional authority is not clear from the public record. What is clear is that he holds these commitments consistently and has acted on them consistently across decades.
## The Father’s Ghost and What Remains
Charles Harrelson died on March 15, 2007, in his cell at ADX Florence. Woody was forty-five. The father who had been absent during his childhood, whom he had encountered across prison visiting room tables as an adult, whose legal case he had spent millions trying to revisit, was gone.