Tommy Chong Suggests That His Arrest Was Orchestrated by George W. Bush
Presumably in an effort to make his own weed consumption seem restrained by comparison, this week Bill Maher hosted stoner legends Cheech and Chong in the subterranean museum of futile Boomer rage known as Club Random.
The two-hour-plus podcast cycled through a number of assorted topics, from Ridley Scott movies, to whether or not Donald Trump wears diapers, to Maher’s fear of TikTok (“China is TikTok, am I wrong?!?!”). But the most interesting conversation concerned Tommy Chong’s 2003 arrest. The comedian was nabbed for selling bongs online, which actually resulted in jail time after he pled guilty in order to protect his son, who was also a part of the company.
According to Chong, this was all because of George W. Bush. “They had a hit on me. The Bush family,” Chong explained. When Maher questioned whether or not the president was trying to have the comedian killed, Chong clarified that he meant that his arrest was timed to be a convenient distraction. “He was invading Iraq, so they needed some sort of hippie bullshit.”
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“Wag the dog?” Maher asked.
“Yeah. So they attacked me, and they sentenced me on 9/11,” Chong responded, adding that “the judge, Schwartz was his name, he had a reputation of doing whatever the Bush people wanted done. And so that’s why he was given my thing.” In his book The I Chong: Meditations from the Joint, Chong further speculated that he may have been targeted specifically because he “spoke out against the war in Iraq.”
It’s true that Chong was sentenced on September 11th 2003, and that the judge in the case (Judge Arthur Schwab, not Schwartz) was a conservative George W. Bush appointee, but was the whole thing really a setup?
Cheech Marin clarified his partner’s point slightly, arguing that the Bush administration “needed a face for their campaign, because they were going after paraphernalia on the internet. And they needed a face for it.”
That campaign in question was the federal investigation Operation Pipe Dreams (you can tell it was a 100 percent serious investigation by the pun name), which used the resources of 2,000 law enforcement officers, and cost a staggering $12 million. But at least it was all in the service of finally taking down an occasional guest star of That ‘70s Show.
There’s no conclusive proof that this investigation, and Bush’s larger, completely laughable “war on pot,” was specifically intended to distract from the calculated horrors in Iraq, but the fact that Tommy Chong of all people had been busted for selling bongs certainly did elicit a great deal of media attention. And Chong’s claim that the Bush administration had it out for him doesn’t seem so crazy considering that a documentary about Chong’s 2003 raid and arrest, a/k/a Tommy Chong, itself became the target of an FBI raid, with the feds reportedly seizing 10,000 DVD copies of the film from the production company’s offices.
“They’re my best career boosters,” Chong said of Bush’s Justice Department.
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