Tommy Chong became famous for adolescent humor about the smoking of marijuana, which made him a folk hero to teenagers forwhomsmoking something other than cigarettes was considered a rite of liberation.

Chong was a lightweight version of Lenny Bruce and one of the brigade of comedians who cut the throat of propriety, then buttered their bread with the knife. In retrospect, he is a minor figure who rose to fame in the 1970s but remains a symbol of what resulted from the 1960s. Those years brought us the civil-rights movement and the disorder of Woodstock.

But when Chong was targeted by the Justice Department during John Ashcroft's reign for the sale of bongs, or drug paraphernalia, Chong became important because of the extent to which federal agents dogged him, spending $12 million by the time the trial was over in 2003 - and Chong was behind bars serving a sentence of nine months.

Josh Gilbert's "a/k/a Tommy Chong" is an important film that will be shown in 300 venues this summer. Gilbert makes a strong case for the comedian as a victim of entrapment by Drug Enforcement Administration agents who were assigned by Ashcroft to continue the decimation of the Woodstock Generation.

Of course, there is a lot of talk that implies that the American government has become as vicious or as ruthless as that of either Russia or China.

Whenever a war starts, there is an argument that security measures have to put some of the Constitution in the deep freezer during the conflict but, when the smoke clears, all will be back in order.

Plenty of historical evidence proves that individual rights have been returned after a war has been won or lost. But Chong's case has an absurd ring to it because of the way that the consumption of drugs was unconvincingly connected to the forces of terror.

I say this as one who has long felt that all drugs should be legalized. The production should be taken over by pharmaceutical companies - and the billion-dollar illegal trade destroyed the way bootlegging was turned into a hill of dust when Prohibition was repealed. That, of course, was 13 years after Prohibition had managed to provide organized crime with enough capital to establish itself as a dark power in our society.

Chong was already wealthy from his films, his albums, his stand-up comedy acts and his bong business when Mary Beth Buchanan became the iron mistress of the Justice Department. She was put in charge of a project called "Operation Pipe Dreams." The unit set its sights on bringing down Chong - and it did.

As far as a viewer can tell, Chong was the victim of entrapment, which makes his case a very serious one, especially since guarding against the abuse of power is one of the central tenets of our Constitution.

Chong's life was much more interesting than one would have expected, and he comes off as a beguilingmanin his middle 60s who did not break the law until DEA agents tricked him into doing so. When they moved on Chong's bong factory, the gear and the ominous black clothes of the arresting officers gave the appearance of what our resident liberal leftists love to call "fascist."

In all, "a/k/a Tommy Chong" is well worth a viewing. You might come away believing, as I do, that we can only free ourselves of the illegal-drug business by taking the profit out of it. Another reason I liked the movie is that I never thought much of Ashcroft, who is paddled at every opportunity.

After all, our former attorney general admired Robert E. Lee and "Stonewall" Jackson. Those men were traitors bent on destroying the United States. Some might say that Ashcroft did his level best to continue their mission.

URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v06/n757/a06.html
Newshawk: http://www.drugsense.org/donate.htm
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Pubdate: Sat, 10 Jun 2006
Source: Sacramento Bee (CA)
Page: B7
Copyright: 2006 New York Daily News
Contact: opinion@sacbee.com
Website: http://www.sacbee.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/376
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Author: Stanley Crouch
Note: Stanley Crouch is a columnist for the New York Daily News. His column routinely appears Saturday in The Bee and occasionally on other days.
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