Tommy Chong, one half of the iconic due Cheech and Chong, shared his thoughts on the emergence of America’s legal marijuana industry recently.
Medical Cannabis Network digital editor, Stephanie Price, spoke with Tommy Chong recently to hear his thoughts on the industry.
Chong has said cannabis changed his life. The comedian has been campaigning for the legalisation of cannabis most of his life.
“I love what’s going on, you know – I fought the battle.” Chong said. “It’s been illegal all of my life – and cannabis changed my life. I got turned on to it at a jazz club. I’m a musician and I used to go down to this club because I could get in for free if I carried my guitar, and even though I couldn’t play jazz, I loved it. I was in a band and the bass player showed up with a marijuana cigarette and a Lenny Bruce record and handed me them both.”
He added, “Marijuana prohibition has been a racial law right from the get-go. It followed in the path of the Chinese opium law. Britain actually almost ruined China with the opium trade and so America, when they wanted to demonise a race of people, they would outlaw their habits – that’s what prohibition was all about. Prohibition was just basically a racist law.”
“It was also enforced with the knowledge that marijuana and hemp are helpful and productive – you can make all sorts of things from them like trains and clothes,” he further said.
He went on to say, “It’s a medicine for so many serious illnesses. They had to pass the medical marijuana law in America so we could have a doctor’s permit to purchase marijuana,” he said. “The 60s, 70s, and the 80s – they were the years when marijuana was associated with hippies and the war protesters. You know, all the “bad people” who were smoking that “bad weed” and creating trouble. Well, now, the face of marijuana is old ladies that take it to help them go to sleep.”
Chong noted that drug is from the Dutch word dröge meaning ‘to dry’.
“Dröge means to dry – so, when hemp was harvested it was taken to the store to dry, and if you wanted hemp you went to the dröge store. They used hemp as medicine then – they had all sorts of tinctures that we have today, we are coming back to what they had before it was made illegal in the early 1900s. So, we are actually going back to the future with cannabis – going back to the beginning in so many ways, and society is moving in the same way. We are at least recognising racist laws.”
“The other problem that we’re having here is that even though it’s legal, it’s not federally legal. We are not allowed to use a banking system for instance. This is still a cash and carry industry. The other sad thing that is going on here now is because of the riots and all the civil unrest – about 60 or more stores have been burgled. Gangs of organised criminals have come in because the cops are so busy with the with the riots that they just walk into the dispensary and rob them at gunpoint. They take all the product and all the money that they can find and then get away because the police are too busy.”
“A lot of sports people that I’ve known are big marijuana advocates because it doesn’t tear you down like alcohol does or make you crazy or addicted like cocaine and heroin. So, marijuana is really the perfect stuff for everything including medicine,” Chong explained.
