AUTOBIOGRAPHY TELLS THE STORY OF A STONER

You might think that three decades after Tommy Chong pioneered the
stoner movie genre with Cheech Marin in Up in Smoke, Canada's Prince
of Pot would be tired of, pardon the pun, rehashing his reputation as
a famous pothead.

"No, not at all. I'm not tired of talking, period," laughs the
Edmonton-born cannabis comic, still smokin' after all these years.
"When you get to my age, man, you look for people to talk to."

Chong, 70, was in the news again last week when Cheech and Chong,
Hollywood's original stoners, announced they would reunite for Hey,
What's That Smell?, their first comedy tour in 25 years.

It was perfect timing, what with the renaissance in stoner flicks:
Pineapple Express, the Harold and Kumar movies, Knocked Up, Dude,
Where's My Car? and so on.

The counter-culture funnyman was certainly happier than the last time
he made headlines: He was busted for selling hand-blown glass bongs
to an undercover agent back in 2003.

Although he maintains he did nothing wrong, he said he pleaded guilty
so the feds wouldn't go after Shelby, his wife of 33 years, and his
son Paris, partners in the family's Chong Glass. He figures his
nine-month jail sentence might have had to do with his quip to the
press that the only weapons of mass destruction George W. Bush was
able to find were his bongs.

His ordeal was chronicled in a.k.a. Tommy Chong, Josh Gilbert's 2006
documentary just released on DVD. It paints Chong as a
civil-liberties activist targeted by those who wrongly assumed he and
his pothead persona were one and the same.

He insists that rather than glamorizing drug use, he was
affectionately satirizing the culture of do-nothing potheads.

Is he worried the DVD release of a.k.a. Tommy Chong will put him back
on the authorities' radar? Not at all, says the comic best known to a
younger generation as Leo, the aging hippie, on Fox's That '70s Show.

"I never worried about it when I was in jail, because I didn't do
anything wrong," Chong says. "They're the ones who have to suffer the
karma and it's coming down on them. I'm just laughing at it."

Besides, he says, there's safety in numbers.

He rattles off a list of famous dope-smokers: Norman Mailer, Louis
Armstrong ("the biggest pothead, he smoked every day"), architect
Frank Gehry and Montel Williams ("because he has MS, he has to.")

He says it's no coincidence some of the most notorious stoners are
geniuses. "Some of my biggest heroes in the entertainment business
smoke pot. I'm in good company."

In his perfect world, Chong jokes, there would be drug tests for
great inventors -- just as there are when accidents occur.

"Like when they invented the computer," he says, mimicking a law
enforcer: "Were you high on pot when you invented this?"

He admits he's on a natural high now that the creative differences
that caused his split with Marin, 62, in the 1980s are up in smoke.

"There was a big ego problem, and then Cheech grew up," he recalls.
"Before that, I was like the boss and Cheech came into his own and
wanted to drive the bus. The only problem was my bus goes one way,
and there's one driver."

He says he was relieved when Marin, who became best known as Don
Johnson's sidekick in Nash Bridges, made overtures about the
possibility of reuniting to reclaim the Cheech and Chong brand.

Although now based in Los Angeles, Chong says he has fond memories of
his years in Vancouver, where he met Marin in 1967, headlined the
sextet Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers, and owned a Davie Street
blues club, the Elegant Parlour.

But he's equally mad about Victoria, home to two of his dearest
friends, poet Patrick Lane, whom he met as a teenager in Vernon when
he was an army cadet; and singer-songwriter B.J. Cook, who performed
with Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers.

"He was incredibly supportive of me," recalled Cook, who met Chong
when she was 18. "He's always called me Bobbie Jean because he knew I
hated it. For the 10 years I lived in Vancouver (1960-1971), I'd say
85 per cent of the work I got came from him."

There's another reason Chong wouldn't mind visiting Victoria. "I love
Victoria. I just love the old people there," he says. "People say you
go to Victoria to die but those (fellows) there, they don't die. They
just hobble around forever, man."