STILL SMOKIN'

After spending nine months locked up, Calgary's counterculture icon
Tommy Chong says his drug bust was a high-profile 'setup'

Tommy Chong will be at the Hi-Fi Club tonight at 6:30 p.m. to promote
the documentary a/k/a Tommy Chong, the opening gala of the Calgary
Underground Film Festival. Tickets are $10.

Tommy Chong recounts the day in February 2003 when 10 armed U.S.
federal agents stormed his California home, complete with
drug-sniffing dogs and a helicopter overhead.

"They asked, do you have any narcotics in the house? I say, 'Of
course. I'm Tommy Chong.' "

That's because Calgary-raised Tommy Chong is to pot what Charlton
Heston is to guns. He's a dope-smoking counterculture hero who rose to
fame as half of the comedy duo Cheech and Chong and developed his
harmless stoner persona into an icon thanks to movies and TV spots.

U.S. authorities, however, didn't find him harmless. The actor was
targeted in a sting operation called Operation Pipe Dreams because his
son, Paris, ran Nice Dreams Inc., an online company that sold
marijuana pipes on the Internet.

But the feds didn't want Paris, or anyone else involved with the firm.
They wanted Tommy Chong, because the paraphernalia was selling on the
strength of his celebrity.

"It was surreal when the (police) showed up," Chong says on the phone
from the same house that was raided. "I wasn't the least bit
frightened. If I had been running a meth lab, it would be different.
But I'm an actor, a writer, a director, a well-known, upstanding
citizen in my neighbourhood. And so when that happened, it was like a
joke. They were running around with automatic weapons and visors. . .
it was like they shot a movie, only they went to the wrong location."

After the raid, Chong was sentenced to nine months in jail and was
fined $20,000. His new joint was the Taft Correctional Institute in
California, where he was prisoner 07798-068. He felt he was being set
up because of how he championed marijuana in films such as Up In
Smoke, Nice Dreams, and Still Smokin'.

"I was set up," he says. "No one did time, the only person that did
time was me. They wanted me, and they knew how to get me. I think more
than it being a deterrent for kids to stay off drugs, it was to shut
up the anti-war protesters. Historically, the anti-war machine has
been fuelled by pot, and so I think it was like a Karl Rove-type
decision to shut me up, so it would be another nail in the coffin of
the anti-war protesters."

The entire story is documented in the documentary a/k/a Tommy Chong.
Chong is in his hometown of Calgary today to promote the film, shot by
Josh Gilbert, which is being screened as part of the Calgary
Underground Film Festival.

"We were looking for some sort of publicity gimmick for a Cheech and
Chong reunion, and next thing I know, I got busted," Chong says. "And
my buddy Josh had my camera, and he just started shooting and kept
shooting the whole time I was in jail. He did all the archival stuff,
put it all together, and it turned out really, really, really well.
I've seen it many times, and I cry every time."

Chong says the nine months in jail were not as bad as one might
expect.

"Those nine months were. . . actually quite exciting," he says. "It
was never boring. Here I am, I'm a comedian, I'm a writer, so I was
doing research. And everywhere I looked, someone had a story.
Sometimes it was sad, sometimes it was funny. So I was a dog in a boneyard.

"I had one bad half-hour a day, the first half-hour when I was in bed,
on a thin mattress, laying next to the brick wall, with the guy
farting and snorting on the bunk on top of me. That half-hour, I would
get claustrophobic, and then a calmness would come over me, and I'd
feel at ease, at peace. And it would be like, 'might as well relax,
I'm going to be here a while.' "

Born in Edmonton, the son of a Chinese father and a Scottish-Irish
mother, Thomas B. Kin Chong moved to Calgary with his family when he
was young, around which time he picked up a job delivering the Calgary
Herald to his neighbours. He started playing guitar at age 11, and
soon after, Chong helped form Alberta's first R&B band, The Shades.
Chong didn't take his first toke of marijuana until he was 17, when a
Chinese bass player passed him a joint. It changed his outlook on life.

That new outlook led to one infamous Calgary moment. After a
particular rowdy gig at the Legion in Calgary in the early '60s, a
mayoral request was issued for Chong and his bandmates to leave town.
He laughs about the incident today.

"The charge was 'joyriding,' " Chong says with a laugh. "A friend of
mine stole a car, but it never ran. And I was under the hood trying to
fix it when the cops came up to us. So we ran and hid in my house, but
the cops, they just followed the footprints in the snow. And they put
us in jail for the night.

"(Then-Calgary mayor Don Mackay) did me the biggest favour, I tell
you," Chong says with a guffaw. "I owe him a big kiss on the cheek."

In exile, he moved to Vancouver, where he met Cheech Marin through a
strip club called Shanghai Junk. The club was owned by Chong's
brother, who wanted to turn it into a venue for improvisational
comedy. Not having the heart to fire the strippers, he recruited them
into sketches, along with Marin, who was then working as a carpet
delivery boy. Cheech and Chong hit it off and subsequently moved to
Los Angeles with their new comedy act. Since their early audiences
consisted of young stoners, they created stoner characters, and they
became the spokesmen for that counterculture.

Comedy albums led to cult films, which led to cult celebrity. Today,
Chong is best known as the burnout Leo on That '70s Show. And that
Cheech and Chong reunion is happening, but not the way you'd expect.

"Well, we're working on a play called Up In Smoke: The Play," he says. "And
it's going to feature young actors playing the young Tommy and the young
Cheech. . . We're hoping to have ours out in about a year.

"Cheech and I keep in touch a lot. We insult each other through the
press, but that's just purely for political purposes. No one's
interested if you're getting along -- you're only news if you rag on
each other."