IT'S NEW! AND IT HAS BUZZ

The Great American Free Enterprise System has given us so many wonderful
gifts. We've got sneakers that light up. We've got cheese in aerosol cans.
We've got candy shaped like worms.

We've got inflatable sex dolls and glow-in-the-dark crucifixes and lawn
ornaments shaped like the butt of a fat lady bending down to pick weeds.
We've got ant farms and pet rocks. We've got Spam and Twinkies and Trix and
Kix and toilet paper printed up to look like money. And now we've been
given a new addition to this pantheon of Great American Stuff:

Bong Water.

In 12-ounce, long-neck bottles. With a label decorated with a picture of a
skull and the slogan: "Stoned to the Bone."

Bong Water is a new soft drink invented in Merrillville, Ind. It contains a
lot of delicious ingredients--high-fructose corn syrup and or sugar and
"Natural & Artificial Flavors," and a heaping helping of caffeine. What
Bong Water does not contain is actual bong water.

This is good. Bong water is water from a bong. A bong is a pipe that
filters marijuana smoke through water. As many a college dorm-room party
animal can attest, the water in a well-used bong gets pretty foul pretty
fast. Before long, it begins to smell like the water left in an aquarium
whose last guppy died last week. When bong water spills on a rug--a not
infrequent occurrence when stoned bong smokers start trying to walk
around--the rug smells like it was dragged through the Great Dismal Swamp.

Many dumb college students have tried to get high by drinking bong water.
But there is no recorded instance of anyone trying it twice. It's that foul.

But Bong Water doesn't taste like bong water. "It's a citrus, grapefruit,
guava taste," says Ira W. Scott, the CEO of Real Things Distributing and
the inventor of Bong Water. "It's sweet and strong. It really reeks--but
it's a good reek."

The name just popped into his head, he says. It was "a name people could
recognize without a lot of advertising." He decided to name the various
flavors of Bong Water after marijuana-related slang--Ganja Grape, Banana
Spliff, Original Chronic, Sensimilla, Ripped Razzberry and so on.

But none of this is a big deal. Any doofus can bottle some fizzy sugar
water and name it after goofy dope slang. Where Scott exhibited his genius
is in the marketing, the hype, the spin. Believe it or not, Scott is
actually touting Bong Water as--get this!--a tool in the war on drugs.

"We're against drugs," he says. "The company is against them, and I'm
against them personally."

Bong Water is a hip alternative to drugs, he claims. "We are urging our
customers to respect their bodies and minds," he writes in a news release,
"and are pleased to offer Bong Water as a cool and satisfying alternative
to underage drinking or participating in the drug culture."

Now, this is some inspired spin. In fact, it's a full 360-degree spin, a
dizzying double-reverse spin. You've gotta admire a guy who can say this
stuff without laughing. Obviously, Scott is a great American salesman, a
man fit to be mentioned in the same sentence as P.T. Barnum, a modern
cousin of the slickers who used to peddle snake oil or underwater Florida
real estate or a bridge in Brooklyn.

"I've been in business since I got out of college," says Scott, 37. "I've
been in investment banking and mortgage banking."

But not always successfully, he says. He admits he was convicted of the
sale of unregistered securities in Indiana in 1992 and sentenced to 15
months of house arrest.

After that, he says, he became a forklift repairman. He saved $2,200 and
used it to start his Bong Water business. His first batch was brewed only a
few weeks ago. It's available around Indiana and Chicago but not yet in the
Washington area.

Meanwhile, in an effort to jump-start public interest, he has issued a news
release that allied Bong Water with the anti-drug efforts of Barry
McCaffrey, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy--the
so-called drug czar.

He did not inform McCaffrey's office about this, however. McCaffrey aide
Steve Panton said he'd never heard of Bong Water--or of bong water or
bongs, either, for that matter. He promised to get his boss's reaction to
Bong Water. The next day, Bob Weiner, McCaffrey's official spokesman,
issued a terse statement on Scott and his soda:

"He was given no authorization to use Barry McCaffrey's name or to
associate his exploitative marketing strategy--making light of drug
paraphernalia--in some way with our efforts against drugs. The question is
why The Post gives credence to these efforts by publicizing them."

The answer is, of course, because we cover American life--the good, the
bad, the ugly and the merely absurd. And because it's August and there's no
news. And because Ira W. Scott gives new meaning to the old Yiddish word
"chutzpah."

The dictionary says chutzpah means "shameless audacity." That's true but
inadequate. That definition is usually augmented by an old story: Chutzpah
is the quality displayed by the kid who killed his parents and then asked
the judge for mercy because he was an orphan.

Maybe now we should augment the definition with a new story: Chutzpah is
the quality displayed by the man who names a soda after dope, markets it
with the slogan "Stoned to the Bone" and then claims it's an anti-drug product.

Is this a great country or what?