Eboni Smith has seen better days, she said from her home in San Antonio, Texas, where she and her longtime partner Kenneth Barnes moved a couple years ago after a life in Virginia. There out East, Barnes and Smith established Tick Tick LLC with a Mercedes Sprinter cargo van with their own authority, moving expedited loads across the United States.
Today, on account of one of those loads, Barnes is locked up in Canadian County, Oklahoma, after an arrest in Arkansas in March.
- Charging documents show a count lodged by the state of Oklahoma against Barnes of "trafficking illegal drugs."
- Charges stem from an early-2025 stop of Smith and Barnes' Sprinter and seizure of 15 boxes of THCa-infused products derived from legal industrial hemp, according to the load's broker, Fide Freight, and its shipper, who is suing the state of Oklahoma and local officials over the seizure.
- Barnes has a preliminary court hearing, now twice pushed back, set for May 27. The 24th of May marked three months in jail for the owner-operator.
- Congress began to change the game around legal hemp with November 2025 legislation; unless legislators modify it, new standards for hemp-derived products go into effect this coming November.
Eboni Smith and Kenneth Barnes' journey moving freight independently in a cargo van started roughly six years ago, and their origin story sounds a lot like many an owner-operator's.
"Kenneth was working at a warehouse in Virginia," Smith said, and "wanted to do something to take into his own hands, to be his own boss."
The pair would go on to team on cross-country runs, working cargo-van-heavy boards like Sylectus and others, where more than once the pair found the Fide Freight broker's loads of hemp-derived products, made legal with the passage of the 2018 farm bill.
Back at the time of that legislation, several cases emerged of hemp haulers finding themselves cross-ways roadside with law enforcement confused about what's legal, and what's not. Over time, reports of commercial drivers locked up for simply doing their work abated, yet Fide Freight CEO Zach Wilcox noted product seizures continued to be a problem time to time.
"We’ve had a few seizures," he said, and "it’s always compliant product. Everything is legal that we’re hauling here."
Those products move interstate with what's known as a Certificate of Analysis showing the load's been verified legal and tested in a lab. Test results are included, along with a special note to law enforcement outlining the legality and including direct contact numbers for Wilcox and other members of his team.
All that may be the case, yet too often at roadside, legal outcomes have depended hugely on fundamentally unpredictable officers.
"If they see it as cannabis" and not legal hemp, "they treat it as such," Wilcox said. After initial seizure, he added, "we’ve had product released many, many times" through the years.
Hemp-derived products moved by Fide Freight are still technically legal to haul through November this year.
When Congress late last year reopened the government, the funding legislation also ordered a change in the "loophole" that allowed hemp-derived THCa products to proliferate. This coming November, without further Congressional actions, the standards will be a big blow to the industry that's grown around these products.
"Hemp started our business," said Fide's Wilcox. "We do a lot of international shipments as well."
Since Congressional moves last Fall, he added, "hemp is a smaller piece" of the broker's business.
The seizure
Well before that big Congressional change, owner-operators Barnes and Smith were working with a dispatcher when they got notification of a Fide Freight load posted on Sylectus, late March 2025.
"We had done a legal hemp load for them before," Smith said.
This one was running from California to North Carolina, with some special instructions designed to guard against law enforcement unpredictability.
"The paperwork let us know to avoid three states: Arkansas, Mississippi and Utah," Smith said, which they did.
Yet in El Reno, Oklahoma, Eboni Smith was behind the wheel when she was pulled over for following too closely, the officer said, and "not maintaining the lane. ... It was very windy that day in Oklahoma," Smith said, as it often is.
Other instructions in the paperwork: "If we get pulled over, we're supposed to hand them the packet of paperwork" including the "letter to law enforcement, and the Certificate of Analysis" noting legality, she said. And "that's what we did."
From the roadside the day of the seizure, Smith is shown in communcation with enforcement next to the couple's Sprinter. All photos courtesy of Eboni Smih
Police would confiscate “15 boxes of marijuana,” or what they considered marijuana per language on the state Bureau of Narcotics release form Smith was made to sign roadside. "While this is happening," Smith noted, men not in uniform arrived and loaded the product into the unmarked black pickup you see here. Barnes, meantime, was on the phone with Fide relaying the situation.
"They took everything," Smith said, including by extension the more than two grand the couple wouldn't make for the run. They were never paid by Fide Freight.
More from the scene.
The owner-operators loaded their dog and themselves back in the van, took a few deep breaths, and drove away.
"Absolutely no more hemp loads," Smith noted thinking at the time. Yet at once "everything's good, you know," she added. "So we took a loss. Keep moving, going about our daily lives."
[Related: The lowdown on downsizing: Hauling in the cargo-van owner-op niche]
The arrest
Nearly a year later, March 24, 2026, Kenneth Barnes was solo in the van, on his way to North Carolina, empty, to see his daughter. Following too close, again, was the reason the Arkansas officer gave when Barnes was pulled over there.
This time, there was a different wrinkle: "You have a warrant out for your arrest," the officer told him.
Barnes: "Are you serious?"
Turns out the owner-operator was now wanted for drug trafficking, and by the end of March 2026 would be extradited from Arkansas to jail in Canadian County, Oklahoma, where he remains.
Kenneth Barnes, enjoying some downtime with Smith during happier times.
In late summer of 2025, Smith and Barnes both told the attorney their side of the story of the seizure. "They said they were going to sue Oklahoma," Smith said, who asked, well, "can we get paid for the miles we ran?"
No definitive answer came there, but the shipper's civil case was filed in September 2025 in federal court in the Western District of Oklahoma against local and state officials, alleging violation of rights with the seizure of a legal product.
It's played out in the many months since with a variety of procedural motions and amended complaints filed by the Plaintiffs, likewise arguments by state and local officials' defense attorneys and motions to dismiss the case.
According to the first amended complaint filed by Plaintiffs in early January this year, when law enforcement officials stopped Barnes and Smith's van they "issued no citation, made no arrest, and filed no criminal charge -- despite claiming to have discovered a large quantity of 'illegal marijuana.'"
The complaint goes on to allege that "this omission was not accidental. That was the point," adding that the "refusal to issue even a minor citation or initiate any criminal or forfeiture proceeding was a calculated decision designed to prevent a judge from reviewing the legality of the stop, the existence of probable cause, or the constitutionality of the seizure. By releasing the driver without charge while retaining the property," officials/Defendants in the case "ensured that no court would be asked to evaluate their actions."
When Barnes was arrested in March, a few months after that filing, Eboni Smith talked to the shipper's attorney again, and the two together learned another distressing fact.
Smith found that she, too, was wanted in Oklahoma on state charges of drug trafficking.
Both warrants were issued in January 2026, nearly 10 months after the initial product seizure but just weeks after the amended complaint quoted above was filed.
The Canadian County prosecutor's office handling the case against Barnes didn't respond to Overdrive queries about the owner-operator's case standing in time for this story, but reps there did confirm a 9 a.m. hearing upcoming May 27 for Barnes. Eboni Smith is hopeful Barnes' public defender, Landon Logan, is successful getting all charges dropped.
Logan, contacted by Overdrive, wouldn't comment on the case one way or another.
The ramifications
Eboni Smith, at a happier moment
When management "pulled me off into a safe space, I told them my fiance was locked up," she said. Company reps were initially supportive, but the end result was they found out she had a warrant out for her arrest, too, when they "did their own research."
Smith was suspended from the position without pay, where she remains, and said that Fide Freight, for its part, "has not been any help at all."
As previously noted, Barnes and Smith were never paid for any part of the work on the load, and Smith hoped other owner-operators and drivers took their story to heart.
"If you see hemp loads," she said, "you don’t really know what kind of trouble you can get into for this, and the broker and shipper don’t want anything to do with it."
Fide Freight CEO Zach Wilcox was circumspect about what he could do, noting that through all those prior product seizures he'd never seen an owner-op or other driver put in jail as a result simply of hauling the product.
Wilcox didn't respond to the question of whether Fide Freight intended to pay Smith/Barnes for the work performed.
"We’re keeping our eyes on it," he said of the owner-operators' dire situation. "Sometimes there’s not much you can do until the court case works itself out."
[Related: Dangers of hemp hauling: Truckers caught in the weeds of federal-state conflict]
