Thursday, March 19, 2009

a/k/a Tommy Chong (2006)--3/5

One of the more surreal things is that the DEA wasn't looking for Tommy Chong's weed. In force, they deployed to his house for making and selling hand blown glass bongs. Specifically--and, in a blatant case of entrapment--for shipping them to a nagging "customer" in Pennsylvania, where pipe-selling shenanigans of this sort are illegal.

"a/k/a Tommy Chong" follows the affable dude's serving a "vacation," he calls it, of nine months in a California minimum-security establishment. It's also an abbreviated biography of the man, positing that the heat from the clueless government was an inevitable detour in his life. Cheech and Chong's paranoid fantasies finally came true, making them more prescient than Aldous Huxley (in stoner logic).

Vintage footage of the W administration shows them equating dope-smoking with terrorism. They tried to make an example of a famous pothead. Instead, they galvanized citizens' awareness of the insane drug war and made Tommy Chong an even stronger activist.


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