Tommy Chong

Back<<

Thomas B. Kin 'Tommy' Chong
(1938)
Canadian comedian, actor & producer,
'Chong' of the legendary duo 'Cheech & Chong'



Nov. 2007 Tommy Chong presents the winners with their 'Cannabis Cup' at the 2007 annual marijuana award show in Amsterdam. (See video)

10 Sept. 2005 Tommy Chong has spent almost three decades wringing laughs from cigar-sized joints and smoke-filled vans but now a nine-month jail term has turned him serious and revitalized his flagging career.

Promoting his documentary "a/k/a Tommy Chong" at the Toronto International Film Festival, he hopes the film will expose what he says is the U.S. government's heavy-handed dealing with marijuana offenders in the post-September 11 era.

"The United States is under martial law, it's under dictatorship," the 67-year-old father of four said in an interview.


08 Sept. 2005 - Chong says he was targeted for his hippie persona

CTV - Edmonton-born Tommy Chong rose to fame in the 1970s as one half of the dope-smoking comedy duo Cheech and Chong.

In 2003, Chong was charged in the United States with conspiring to sell drug paraphernalia and sentenced to prison, what he now calls an assault on his civil liberties

The 67-year-old claims it was his hippie persona as an actor, which led to his crucifixion by an over-zealous U.S. government looking for a scapegoat.

Chong's arrest and nine-month prison stint is now the focus of a documentary titled a/k/a Tommy Chong , which debuts at the Toronto International Film Festival this week.

Directed by Josh Gilbert, it asks tough questions about the judicial priorities of the U.S. government in its relentless crusade against marijuana and its users.

According to the documentary's website, Chong was "crucified" for this "stoner" persona that he embodied on screen.

Born in Edmonton, Chong teamed up with Cheech Marin in Vancouver, where they honed their comedic personas as perpetually stoned hippies in improvisational theatre. Their brand of humour won them many fans from the drug counterculture.

In early 2003, Chong was charged for selling glass water pipes, also known as bongs, and other drug paraphernalia over the Internet.

He pleaded guilty to conspiring to sell drug paraphernalia on behalf of Nice Dreams Enterprises, which did business under the name Chong Glass.

His plea came after federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents bought the paraphernalia and had the items shipped to an undercover business in Beaver Falls, northwest of Pittsburgh.

Agents also confiscated "thousands of marijuana bongs and pipes" in a raid of the Gardena, Calif., business.

At the Taft Correctional Facility in California, Chong was careful to dance a fine line as he tried to stay out of trouble.
"The thing is, I've been around guys that have been in jail before," he said, appearing on CTV's Canada AM, dressed in a button-down blue shirt, his beard and moustache neatly trimmed.

"So I knew the trick about when you're in jail, you got to act crazy and then people will leave you alone," he said.

Chong's plan of attack? To keep dangerous prisoners at bay by performing what he calls the "tango walk" -- a cross between a saunter and the ballroom dance.

His plan appeared to pay off.

"I was doing a tango walk ... and all the bikers were laughing at me one day ... and one of the bikers goes 'Hey, Chong, I'll dance with you,'" he said.

"So I walked over and started dancing with him."

After he was released from prison, Chong said he pleaded guilty to keep his son Paris from going to jail.

"It was really hard to fight the case because my face was on all the bongs. It was very hard to say it wasn't me. It was called Chong Bongs," he said.

Chong was the only person of the 55 arrested during the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's "Operation Pipe Dreams" to serve time in prison.

In the sentencing memorandum, prosecutors cited Chong's movies as "glamorizing the illegal use and distribution of marijuana and trivializing law-enforcement efforts to combat drug use."

Tommy Chong shares a few laughs while appearing on CTV's Canada AM.	Director and Producer of 'a/k/a Tommy Chong,' Josh Gilbert, speaks with CTV's Canada AM.	Actor and comedian Tommy Chong's time in prison is explored in the documentary 'a/k/a Tommy Chong,' which opens at the Toronto Film Festival.

Tommy Chong in 'Secret Agent 420'.

This year will see the release of the movie: 'Secret Agent 420' Bong, James Bong is his name and smokin', pimpin' and saving the planet from lack of hemp is his game. With Rich Trapp, Tommy Chong, Jack Herer and even Frank the angry Dwarf. The freshest, dopest most extreme action adventure comedy of 2005!

Dec 2004 - Tommy Chong was a major presence at Comedy Central’s Commie Awards show in December. Despite the fact he’s in jail serving a nine-month sentence for interstate bong sales, Chong received an award: Best Comedian Behind Bars. And who accepted that award? None other than his long-estranged comedy partner, Cheech Marin.

After suggesting Chong’s friend of 30 years, the newly elected. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, should commute the sentence (he couldn’t even if he wanted to—Chong was convicted of a federal, not state, crime), Marin led the Culver City audience in a chant of "Free Tommy Chong!"

The comedian’s imprisonment came just as plans were being finalized to re-unite him with Marin on the screen for the first time in 20 years. After Chong’s release in May the stoner icons are slated to portray anti-drug counselors at a boys' home in Cheech and Chong Get Blunt, cowritten by Chong’s daughter, Rae Dawn.

At Chong’s sentencing last September, US District Court Judge Arthur J. Schwab forced him to agree to the stipulation that he may not profit in any way from his arrest and incarceration. If Chong as much as talks about his arrest in his stand-up act or in the film, he’ll be indicted for perjury and face additional jail time.

September 12, 2003 - Post-Gazette - 'Actor Tommy Chong gets nine months for selling pot pipes' - After describing himself as a former marijuana user who beat drugs by learning to dance to salsa, 65-year-old actor Tommy Chong told a federal judge yesterday that he's now a role model for young people in Los Angeles and wants to help them stay off drugs.

He and his lawyers were hoping for a community service sentence as punishment for distributing thousands of bongs and marijuana pipes online through his California company, Nice Dreams Enterprises.

But Chong, famous for such movies as "Up in Smoke" with longtime partner Cheech Marin, is going to prison instead.

U.S. District Judge Arthur J. Schwab yesterday gave him nine months in a federal lockup and fined him $20,000.

As part of the sentence, Chong forfeited his Internet domain name, Chongglass.com, along with $103,514 in cash and all of the drug paraphernalia seized by federal agents during a raid Feb. 24.

He'll be allowed to self-report to prison, probably to a facility nearest his Pacific Palisades, Calif., home.

The case against him was part of "Operation Pipe Dreams," a national investigation of drug paraphernalia distributors that began in Pittsburgh during the prosecution of Akhil Kumar Mishra and his wife, Rajeshwari, who ran two head shops Downtown in the 1990s.

In February some 55 people were arrested and head shops and distributors across the country were shut down. Chong wasn't arrested at the time, but his business, which employed several glass blowers, was among those raided.

U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan, who appeared in court for the hearing yesterday, said the sentence was significant because it tells the public that "there are consequences for violating the law, even if the violator is a well-known entertainer like Thomas Chong."

Chong pleaded guilty in May. After his plea, he joked with the news media about putting the criminal case in his next movie with Cheech Marin. The U.S. attorney's office pointed to those comments to show that Chong, far from being apologetic, was making light of the case and might exploit it for money. When reporters asked him for comment this time, he said only "not a word." In court, he said plenty.

Chong, whose full name is Thomas B. Kin Chong, apologized for his conduct and said he had tried to make amends by instructing young people in inner-city L.A. to dance and learn about the movie industry, saying he has a "natural ability to teach."

He also said anti-drug commercials don't work on young people and he asked for the chance to "make a difference" by using his celebrity to help them stay sober.

"I play a loser for laughs," he said. "My movie, 'Up in Smoke,' was made 30 years ago. I couldn't make that movie today. I'm not that person anymore."

Federal prosecutors indicated they weren't entirely convinced.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Mary McKeen Houghton pointed out, for example, that when agents raided his home they found close to a pound of marijuana.

She also said Chong had made a career of glamorizing pot-smoking and capitalized on his status in making personal appearances at head shops across the United States, where he promoted his line of bongs and pipes with his picture on them.

In addition, he advertised the paraphernalia on his company's Web site and on his personal Web site, tommychong.com. Houghton said Chong "used his public image to promote this crime" and marketed his products to children.

Chong and his lawyers had previously asked Schwab to postpone sentencing so they could explore alternatives like community service, but the judge said "no." They asked again yesterday and again the judge said "no."

Schwab actually gave Chong a bit of a break. Under sentencing guidelines, he could have sentenced him to a year in prison and a $250,000 fine.

But he also could have let Chong serve part of his term in a halfway house or on home detention. He refused to do either, saying the prison term was "appropriate."

Chong admitted to distributing 7,500 bongs and marijuana pipes on the Internet through Nice Dreams, a family company that was named for one of his movies.

He also entered a guilty plea for the company, which did business as Chong Glass in Gardena, Calif. The corporation is now defunct.

See Tommy Chong's deleted website here!


10-04-1996 - From 'Tommy Chong tokes up at Mainstreet' - Neal C. Carruth - One could reasonably say that comedian Tommy Chong has a one-track mind. For the half-Chinese, half-Scotch / Irish half of the dissolved comedy duo of Cheech and Chong, the conversation never strays far from marijuana. And you can be sure that Chong's current stint of three performances at Ann Arbor's Main Street Comedy Showcase will play off variations on this familiar theme.

"I'm a born-again doper, so there'll be a lot of born-again doper jokes," Chong told The Michigan Daily in a recent telephone interview. In spite of the now temperate views of his one-time partner Richard "Cheech" Marin, the 58-year-old Chong has remained unabashedly devoted to marijuana, its medicinal applications and the industrial uses of hemp, the fiber extracted from the marijuana plant. "I'm a big hemp advocate," Chong noted. "Hemp is going to replace everything."

Chong is certainly something of an authority on marijuana, having been a friend of the weed for the past 40 years. A unique dimension of Chong's interest in marijuana is his belief that "pot and working out go hand in hand." Toward this end, he has been developing a workout video titled "A Doper's Guide to Fitness." As Chong explains it: "If you're gonna party, you gotta be in shape. If you're in shape, you can do everything once." Chong observed that he has been lifting weights and seriously working out longer than he's been smoking dope.

Not only is the video no laughing matter, but Chong was dead serious when he told me that he wants people to know, "I really do smoke pot." When asked about Ann Arbor's own slice of commercialized hedonism, the annual Hash Bash, he said, "I think we need more dope-smoking. I intend to make (Hash Bash) so it's every day."

Chong failed to acknowledge the psychologically addicting lure of marijuana and said the only thing he's addicted to is Salsa dancing. And when pressed about marijuana's status as a so-called "gateway" drug, Chong responded, "It's definitely a gateway, but the gate can lead to anything, like creativity or mind expansion."

Despite Chong's contention that "every generation gets to go through their doper stage," times have changed somewhat since the early '70s when Cheech and Chong arrived on the comedic scene. This change can be gauged by Marin's transition from a crude, perpetually stoned doper to one of the voices in Disney's "The Lion King" and his role on CBS's police show "Nash Bridges." Of this, Chong said, "If you told me in '85 that Cheech was gonna be playing a cop, I would have asked what you were smoking."

Cheech & Chong Cheech & Chong

1981 - From Nice Dreams press kit, Columbia Pictures - The hustling, Dallas-like metropolis, nestling in the Canadian Rockies and world-famous for its rodeos, oil riches and wide-open lifestyle, seems somehow fitting as the place where Tommy Chong grew up.

Born in Edmonton, Alberta's capital city a few hundred miles farther north, Chong and his family soon moved down the road a piece, to a town on the outskirts of Calgary called Dog Patch. Tommy figures his father, a truck driver, made the move because "he'd been wounded in World War II, and there was a veteran's hospital in Calgary. He bought a five-hundred dollar house in Dog Patch, and raised his family on fifty dollars a week."

While the senior Chong was Chinese, Tommy's mother was Scotch-Irish. The ethnic mixture accounts not only for his one-of-a kind appearance -- as Cheech puts it, "He was the first kind of whatever it is he is that I'd ever seen" -- but also presumably shaped his personality into its wary inscrutability. He is not at all the dazed hippie he often pretends to portray.
In fact, his undeniable high intelligence surfaced early, at first sending him into the fantasy world of movie addiction when he was still a youngster. ("My idea of a perfect Saturday was to take all my pocket money and wander from movie house to movie house," he recalls.)

But Dog Patch was "a tough place," he goes on, "and we used to box with homemade gloves made out of burlap." He was pretty good at the sport, even though "the burlap left marks when you got hit."

By eleven, though, he'd been given his first guitar, and started playing country-and-western music. Then a couple of years later the area's black families turned him on to rhythm and-blues, which reached that part of Canada via the porters on the Canadian Pacific Railway.

Joshing that he quit high school "after I got too big for the football team," Chong in reality quit when he got his first job as a professional musician.

Working at survival jobs such as truck driving and roof-laying as he tried to form successful musical groups, he eventually came up with Western Canada's first R&B band, the Shades, so named for its ethnic mixture. When a particularly rowdy gig at Calgary's Canadian Legion Hall brought a mayoral request to leave town, the Shades split for Vancouver, where Chong bought his own place, an after-hours bistro called the Elegant Parlour. Still music-oriented, he played guitar for the house band -- Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers.

Signed by Motown Records in 1965, the Vancouvers had at least one hit -- "Does Your Mama Know About Me," co-written by Chong and since recorded by the Jackson Five and others.
It was while he was on the road with the Vancouvers that Chong discovered improvisational comedy. Troupes like San Francisco's "Committee" and Chicago's "Second City" fired his imagination to such a pitch that he left his musical group and headed home to Vancouver where his brother's nightclub, the Shanghai Junk, would be his spawning ground in comedy.

"It was a topless joint and I didn't have the heart to fire the strippers," recalls Chong, "so when I turned the show into a comedy troupe known as 'City Works,' I put the girls in the skits. We had the only topless improvisational theatre in Canada."

Young would-be comics heard of the place, and showed up to try their wings. Among them was Cheech, by now weary of driving a delivery truck for a local rug merchant.

The relationship was cemented when Chong offered Cheech $60 a week to perform with "'City Works," five dollars more than he was making laying carpet. Two years later, when "City Works" disbanded, they teamed as Cheech and Chong and set out on a long road of one-night stands, ending up in California because they were tired of cold weather.

Performing at L.A.'s influential Troubadour Club, they were spotted by a record executive and signed. By the time their first record album, "Cheech & Chong," went gold, they were well into their second, "Big Bambu' -- voted 1972s No. 1 comedy album.

After their third, "Los Cochinos" ("The Pigs"), brought them a Grammy Award, their fourth, "Cheech & Chong's Wedding Album," so solidified their success that for four years the duo toured the concert circuit, polishing such celebrated routines as "Dave's Not Here" to a high gloss.

With their stunningly successful move into films, Cheech and Chong have settled into comfortable lives at last, with homes in L.A.'s poshest sections -- Malibu for Cheech, Bel-Air for Chong.

Again reflecting their generation, they have become family men, in love with their homes, their wives and their children.

Their explanation for such undeniable success?

"One reason, perhaps, that the kids like us," says Cheech, "is that if a couple of screw-ups like Cheech and Chong can make it through the world, without selling out, then there's hope for every youngster in the ghetto.

"We're living proof that heaven watches out for fools and small children."

Chong puts it another way. "What makes us so dangerous is that we're harmless."

Read more >>