If you spend enough time with Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong, America’s best-known pothead entertainers, you’ll hear enough stories to realize why the duo became comedy legends.
Consider this gem: Sometime in the late 1970s, after Marin was wanted by the FBI for dodging the draft during the Vietnam war, and after Cheech and Chong became household names, the Los Angeles native dropped acid with the king of turning on and dropping out—Timothy Leary.
“[Leary] had this great blotter acid,” says Marin, 79, while sitting in his home office near Joshua Tree, California.
On Matador Beach in Malibu one night, Leary taught Marin all about the stars and constellations while the LSD took hold. Marin had visions of cave men looking up at the stars and telling stories about the figures and shapes they saw above. And that’s when he had a revelation: “You could connect with a whole history of people looking up at the sky,” he says. “It was a moment of we-are-all-one by this fact that we're in this universe that we can identify.”
He also learned one of the best tips for surviving the early days of the war on drugs from Leary’s fifth wife, Barbara. Marin asked her how to disguise a sheet of acid while traveling and she wrote a phone number and address on it. Now, it was just a piece of paper with a woman’s information. “A good smuggling trick,” says Marin.
As for Tommy Chong, now 87, he, too, has his fair share of tales from his decades of being a Hollywood star (including how he got high with Arnold Schwarzenegger during his early years as a body builder on Venice Beach) and a convicted felon. In 2003, the Drug Enforcement Administration raided his home in California in connection with his bong company, Chong Glass, on charges of conspiracy to distribute drug paraphernalia. In September of that year, he was sentenced to nine months in prison. His cellmate? The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort, who was serving time for fraud related to his notorious penny stock scheme immortalized by Martin Scorsese’s 2013 film.
One day, while Chong was working on his book Belfort sat down and started writing too. He wrote one page and “he handed it to me, like I was a teacher,” Chong says.
“I looked at the page and I recognized that he had copied [Tom Wolfe’s] The Bonfire of the Vanities. I realized the guy was a thief, he would even plagiarize a book, just out of habit,” Chong says, laughing.
Chong advised Belfort to write down all the stories he shared at night about “the women, the drugs, the whole thing.” Belfort wrote every day after that. And when they both got out, Belfort showed up at Chong’s house and told him how he sold his memoir and that Scorsese was going to direct the movie. “Wow, that was a trip,” says Chong.
These days, Cheech and Chong are playing by the rules, as long as you ignore the federal laws regarding marijuana. In 2020, the duo, along with their business partners Brandon Harshbarger, Jonathan Black, and Tom Cole, launched two companies, California-based Cheech and Chong Cannabis Co., which licenses its brand, genetics, formulas and retail designs to marijuana companies, and Cheech and Chong’s Global Holding Company, a Nevada-based endeavor that sells hemp-derived products ranging from gummies to flower to THC-infused drinks. (The hemp company also licenses the Cheech and Chong brand to make accessories and apparel.)
And there’s nothing to joke about when it comes to their business, of which they own about 8% each. In 2025, the companies’ combined revenue will hit nearly $100 million from both marijuana and hemp, up from about $50 million last year. The companies, which outsource manufacturing to third parties, are worth roughly $150 million.
