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Feds Smoke Out
Chong?
2/24/2003
Tommy Chong's Chong
Glass makes a promise to its customers. All of its
products--chiefly, handmade pipes that the Los Angeles Times once
wrote "could double as a bong"--are, the company Website says, "for
legal blend and tobacco use only."
Or maybe not.
Chong, once
one-half of the high-flying (literally) comedy team, Cheech & Chong,
saw his Gardena, California, factory and Pacific Palisades home
raided Monday by federal drug agents and other authorities, Los
Angeles TV station NBC4 reported.
The Chong sweep was
said to be related to nationwide Drug Enforcement Agency-led
crackdowns on businesses that trade, in what U.S. Attorney General
John Ashcroft (news - web sites) called Monday the "illegal drug
paraphernalia industry."
The
initiatives--dubbed, in the tradition of double-entendre-titled
Cheech & Chong flicks, Operation Pipe Dreams and Operation
Headhunter--swept up 55 people from California to Florida, with most
of the arrests coming in Pennsylvania.
Neither Tommy
Chong, nor Chong Glass, was named in the indictment.
A message left on
Chong Glass' answering machine ("Okay, damn, you just reached Chong
Glass," its owner intones on the outgoing message) was not returned
Monday.
A DEA official said
search warrants were served on Chong's business and home. It was not
immediately known what came of the raids.
Chong Glass, with
its stock of handpipes and hammers and sidecars, is described in the
comic's official bio as a family business providing "a unique
collection of high-quality, original functional art and signature
merchandise."
"When he is not at
Chong Glass testing the merchandise," his Website notes, Chong, 64,
is on the stand-up circuit twice a month with his new partner in
gags, wife Shelby.
Chong's show-biz
career started smoking in the 1970s when he and Cheech Marin played
tie-dyed stoners in a series of pot-joke comedies, such as Up in
Smoke.
The duo split in
1985. Marin went prime-time, playing Don Johnson's straight-shooting
partner in Nash Bridges. Chong continued to bill himself as a hemp
advocate and a "born-again doper," playing Hyde's stoner tie-dyed
boss on That '70s Show.
Last month, Chong's
daughter, actress Rae Dawn Chong (news), told E! Online that she has
penned a script aimed at reuniting her father with Marin. Its title:
Cheech & Chong Get Blunt.
The people indicted
Monday, many of them owners of either real-world retail shops or
cyber-space e-commerce sites, were charged with selling items that,
the feds say, are "primarily intended or designed to be used in
ingesting, inhaling or otherwise using controlled substances."
Translation: Bongs,
crack pipes, roach clips, miniature spoons.
Those under
indictment face a maximum three years in prison, and/or a $250,000
fine, per count, if convicted.
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