Pubdate: Sun, 10 May 2009
Source: El Paso Times (TX)
Copyright: 2009 El Paso Times
Contact: http://www.elpasotimes.com/formnewsroom
Website: http://www.elpasotimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/829
Author: Doug Pullen
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?420 (Cannabis - Popular)

CHEECH AND CHONG: COMEDY TOUR STOKES TALK ON POT LEGALIZATION

EL PASO -- Ex-convict Tommy Chong and his pal Cheech  Marin are 
smoking hot, just as they were 30 years ago.

Since reuniting in September after 24 years apart, they  have been 
selling out theaters and jokingly calling  their "Light Up America" 
trek the "Felimony" tour.

Chong, 70, served nine months in federal prison after  his 2003 
conviction on a drug paraphernalia charge, and  Marin, 62, went 
through a costly divorce.

Cheech and Chong, the '70s stoner comedy version of  Hope and Crosby, 
will be in concert at 8 p.m. Friday at  the Abraham Chavez Theatre. 
It will be their first  performance in El Paso in nearly 35 years. 
Chong's  wife, Shelby, will open the show.

Their tour arrives when the national debate over  decriminalizing 
marijuana and other drugs is heating  up.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently called  for a debate 
on the possibility of legalizing -- and  taxing -- marijuana in his 
cash-strapped state, where  medicinal use is legal. Federal law prohibits it.

The El Paso City Council jump-started the dialogue in  January when 
it voted 8-0 for South-West city Rep. Beto  O'Rourke's suggestion 
that the federal government start  "a serious debate" about 
legalizing drugs to help stop  the drug-cartel violence that has 
killed more than 2,000 people in JuA!rez in the past 16 months.

Chong and Marin have followed those stories. Chong, a  member of the 
advisory board of the marijuana  legalization group NORML, thinks 
O'Rourke is on to  something.

"That's what happens when you have something that everybody wants, 
but keep it illegal," he said of Mexico's cartel violence.

"You create this prohibition-style mafia, and that's  the way it 
goes. It's blind greed. There are no rules.  That's the problem.

"If you legalize it, at least you eliminate that huge  problem of law 
enforcement. Now you've got a cap on  it."

While elected officials debate marijuana legalization,  Chong says he 
doesn't smoke the herb anymore.

Nor does he believe Cheech and Chong were wrong to use  or joke about 
marijuana. Cheech and Chong was a comedy  team first and foremost, he 
said, not advocates for  drug use or abuse.

"The thing about our humor is it was a gentle approach.  It wasn't a 
militant approach. And it's still working,"  Chong said. "It's what's 
made us last all these years.  We weren't fighting a war. We were 
showing people how  life really is."

O'Rourke said he has studied drug legalization more  intensely since 
he created a media firestorm by adding  his amendment to a series of 
recommendations by the  Border Relations Committee to address 
drug-related  violence. He says decriminalizing marijuana might hurt cartels.

"There's no true way to know, because it's a  non-reported black 
market, but people say that 50 to 75  percent of the cartels' 
revenues are dependent upon  marijuana," O'Rourke said. "If you take 
that away from  them, it will at least destabilize and affect 
their  ability to recruit new members and the kind of heavy  weaponry 
used to outgun the Juarez police and,  frankly, the Mexican military."

In many ways, Chong became a symbol for those who say  U.S. marijuana 
laws are wrongheaded.

He pleaded guilty to a federal charge of conspiracy to  sell drug 
paraphernalia after a Department of Justice  sting called Operation 
Pipe Dreams, authorized by  then-Attorney General John Ash croft. A 
total of 55  people and businesses suspected of selling drug 
paraphernalia were charged, Chong being the most  famous.

Chong's Nice Dreams Enterprises was the main investor  in son Paris 
Chong's Chong Glass, a line of bongs and  water pipes sold on the 
Internet. Federal prosecutors  said they pursued the comedian instead 
of his son for a  couple of reasons.

"Tommy Chong was the more responsible corporate officer  because he 
financed and marketed the product," U.S.  Attorney Mary Beth 
Buchanan, whose Pittsburgh-based  staff prosecuted the case, told LA 
Weekly in 2003.

At Chong's sentencing on Sept. 11, 2003, Assistant U.S.  Attorney 
Mary McKeen Houghton said the raid on Chong's  home earlier that year 
turned up nearly a pound of  marijuana, for which he was not charged. 
Prosecutors  said they were more concerned that he glorified and 
profited from drug use.

Chong "used his public image to promote this crime" and  market 
products to children, Houghton said at the  hearing, according to the 
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Chong accepted a plea agreement, sparing his wife and  son from 
prosecution. Part of this was an admission  that Nice Dreams (named 
for a Cheech and Chong movie)  distributed 7,500 bongs and pipes 
through the Internet,  according to the Post-Gazette.

He hoped for a community service sentence, but was  ordered to a 
minimum-security prison, fined $20,000 and  forced to forfeit 
$103,514 in cash, plus all of the  paraphernalia seized from a raid 
on Chong Glass near  his home in Pacific Palisades, Calif.

The comedian, who had a recurring role on "That '70s  Show" at the 
time, was behind bars from Oct. 8, 2003,  to July 7, 2004, during 
which he worked as a prison  janitor and wrote a book called "I, Chong."

O'Rourke said he saw no justice in Chong's case.

"Tommy Chong's prosecution in Pennsylvania is a case in  point on the 
failure of this drug war," said O'Rourke,  who grew up watching 
Cheech and Chong movies, but said  he does not smoke marijuana or 
advocate its use. "We've  spent millions ... basically to prosecute a 
comedian using his name and visibility to market bongs through  the 
Internet. If that's not a waste of resources, I  don't know what is."

The Cheech and Chong tour, which stretches into  September, is 
expected to produce a live concert DVD  (filmed in March in San 
Antonio), animated DVDs of some  of their '70s albums and a film 
Chong described as "'Up  in Smoke' revisited, 30 years later," a 
reference to  their hit 1978 movie.

"It's been one thing after the other. It's just  expanding, 
expanding, expanding," Marin said from his  hotel room in Brisbane, 
the last stop on their  Australian tour.

Drug-sniffing dogs were dispatched to two Austra lian  theaters where 
Cheech and Chong performed last month.  It was the start of a bad 
memory for Chong.

"I felt like an Auschwitz survivor where they bring out  the dogs and 
I think, 'Oh, Lord, I hope I don't have  anything I forgot,' " he 
said. "You keep your guard up  nowadays."

Neither Chong nor Marin was arrested or charged with  anything in Australia.

Marin says the duo has a new appreciation for its place  in comedy 
history. "I look back and there's no other  comedy team in history 
that I can think of -- not  Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, 
Martin and Lewis  -- who after 30 years apart come back and put a cap 
on  their career triumph."

Chong said the success of the reunion has given him  some distance 
from his legal troubles.

"I get a laugh out of it now because it went from the  bottom, no 
hope, to wow, this is something else. I'm  amazed all the time, and 
thankful, by the way.

"I give thanks every day. There's nothing that bothers  me now. It's a plus."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom