Cheech & Chong Dispensary Plans And Stoner Stories From The ’70s In Consumer's Market
If you were to assemble an Avengers of weed smokers, you’d have some pretty legendary stoners to pick from. You’ve got Snoop Dogg, Rihanna, Willie Nelson, The Game, Kevin Smith, Jim Belushi, Sarah Silverman (with a cameo from her parents), Bob Marley, Woody Harrelson, Rogen, Chainz, Wiz… The list goes on.
But among all of history’s cannabis lovers, two names rise above the rest. Tommy Chong and Cheech Marin.
For many present-day tokers, “Cheech & Chong” served as an introduction to the world of cannabis. Whether you grew up on movies like Up in Smoke or Born in East LA or were introduced to the pair via some other means, maybe Fern Gully or That ’70’s Show, weed and Cheech & Chong just go together. It’s like peanut butter and jelly.
Which makes it even more surprising that the comedy collaborators currently have zero shared presence in the booming legal cannabis industry. Because as solid as both Cheech’s Private Stash and Tommy Chong’s Cannabis are, what the people want is a Cheech & Chong co-branded line. Five Point Holdings (run by Tommy’s son, Paris) definitely seems to think so. The brand recently signed Marin and Chong to a multi-year agreement with shops opening in California, Nevada, Arizona, Illinois, and Washington. These legal dispensaries — which will feature Cheech & Chong movies on loop, film and TV memorabilia, and city-specific decor –are set to open in 2021, beginning with San Francisco and followed shortly by Los Angeles.
To dive deeper into this new project, we chopped it up with Tommy Chong over the phone about the corporatization of cannabis, why it’s taken so long for a Cheech & Chong joint project to hit the weed space, and just how much weed the legend actually smokes. He also shares a pretty damn funny Joni Mitchell anecdote.
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How involved are you and Cheech in the curation of the products?
We’re the number one testers. We test all the products, and then we reach out to my wife for sure, and Cheech’s wife to some extent… and all our kids. They’re all connoisseurs. They grew up with the best weed in the world, all of their lives. We have a very close-knit family testing system set up. We’re involved in every stage of this thing, it’s not just lending our names, sitting back, and collecting our money.
Why has it taken this long to do an official Cheech & Chong branded weed? It seems like as soon as dispensaries opened it would’ve been a natural fit.
It was. But the trouble was it was too soon. We had to wait, you don’t want to grab the first one off the assembly line. Let everything play out, that’s what we did. All the greedy entrepreneurs who were just in it for the money, they got burned. They had no eye on consumers, or the product, no respect for the actual plant itself.
We’re like growers, you don’t pick the plant before it’s totally ripe. So we let the industry ripen, the ones that were early fell by the wayside. We had the advantage of seeing what mistakes they made and how we can come in and correct the mistakes. One of the biggest problems was the way the government was trying to overtax and over-regulate everything. Now we’re coming into a point where it’s no longer number one on the radar as far as people trying to make a buck.
Anything good, you have to work at it to make it work for you.
Take us into these new dispensaries, what can we expect?
Each one is going to be [different] according to where it’s at. We’re going to start with San Francisco and LA. What we’re doing is we’re going into Cheech and Chong territory. We could live off our fans in the Southwest, but we have fans all over the world. Our big core audience has always been in California though. Cheech is Chicano, and I’m… Canadian. I can be from anywhere. We go very deep into a family thing in California, so our stores are going to start here. We want to make that distinction. It’s about respecting the product and the people that use it.
Other than Texas, California really was the epicenter of marijuana. That’s where it came through, that’s probably where it was made illegal! When Hearst decided it made you crazy and would kill people. That was a racist law! We’re taking advantage of that and going right for our hardcore fans off the bat. Then we’ll broaden out to places that need us because it is a medicine and it is essential. We’ve proven that with the pandemic. Bars closed, the dispensaries never did. That tells you a lot.
How do you feel about the overall corporatization of cannabis?
It’s a medicine. We’re trying to provide medicine for as many people as we can. If we make a few bucks out of it, great. I know for myself, I’m going to turn my profits into helping people. The last thing I’m going to do is warehouse it offshore. You can do so much with money — I’m only speaking for myself I’m not speaking for Cheech.
The reason Cheech and Chong don’t retire is because we have too many families between us to support, so we gotta keep working.