"Dig me jolly liberalitarian lifestyle, mon!"
Posted on 09/12/2005 4:36:47 PM PDT by freepatriot32
TORONTO (Reuters) - Comedian Tommy Chong has spent almost three decades wringing laughs from cigar-sized joints and smoke-filled vans but now a nine-month jail term has turned him serious and revitalized his flagging career.
Promoting his documentary "a/k/a Tommy Chong" at the Toronto International Film Festival, he hopes the film will expose what he says is the U.S. government's heavy-handed dealing with marijuana offenders in the post-September 11 era.
"The United States is under martial law, it's under dictatorship," the 67-year-old father of four said in an interview.
The film chronicles the Canadian-born comedian's 2003 arrest and imprisonment for selling drug paraphernalia online to an undercover U.S. drug enforcement agent.
The bust was part of a sting operation known as "Operation Pipe Dreams," which the film likens to a witch hunt by former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft following claims that drug trafficking financed terrorist activities.
The film's producers say the federal government spent $12 million pursuing Chong and compare that to the $25 million bounty for the capture of Osama bin Laden.
Chong has been an outspoken marijuana advocate since his days in the Cheech and Chong comedy team, which rode pot culture to fame in the 1970s with films like "Up in Smoke" and "Still Smokin."
The documentary suggests the government's motive was not to rid the Internet of a mail-order pipe-and-bong business but to send a message about Chong's three decades of movies and stand-up routines celebrating marijuana use.
"DEA AFRAID"
"The DEA was afraid that 'Up in Smoke' (the 1978 movie that made Cheech and Chong a household name) was going to be around forever and ever subverting young kids," Chong said. "Now, we've got this documentary that's going to be around forever."
Faced with the prospect of seeing his wife and son -- who was running the pipe business -- being prosecuted, Chong said he made a deal to serve nine months in a minimum-security prison
"It was easier for me to go to jail and do the time than it would be to fight," he said.
Since his release in 2004, Chong has worked the ordeal into his comedy routines and has been enjoying a larger stage than in his recent past.
"Jay Leno is a good example," he said. "He had me on the 'Tonight Show' before but just for little peripheral things, never on the couch, and when this happened, now I've been on the couch twice now."
"It's like the weed culture. You just wait, it'll change. Everything changes. Bush won't be in power forever, Ashcroft is already gone. There's going to be another cycle and it's going to go the other way."
Non-legal other drugs should never be legal.
Being drunk in your home daily would be called a drunk and that isn't good.
I think the regular people call it the law.
So you oppose the Founder's ideal of limited government? That's how the liberals feel too.
Yeah, I love it, at least lurkers will realize they aren't normal conservatism and are in way left field.
Being drunk in your home daily would be called a drunk and that isn't good.
That doesn't answer the question. Why do you even bother to post a reply if you won't answer the question?
You could pose that question to a couple of other's posting here tonight. My guess is, you're asking the alter ego. Blackbird.
Well, you posted to me in another thread (#106) in response to my #100, but your post (quotes) had "nothing" to do with what I said in my #100.
The founding fathers lived in savage territory, we do not, deal with it.
No insult there?
"feel-good nanny-state socialism."
Keep digging. Oh, and please give examples.
"WTF are you doing on a conservative forum?"
;)
... being conservative...
"Dig me jolly liberalitarian lifestyle, mon!"
A typical drug warrior substitute for argument. This thread like many earlier ones has critics of the War on Drugs offering evidence, reasoning, and the Drug Warriors making silly and unsubstantiated claims (like A CA Guy's claim that Chong would have died if he hadn't been imprisoned) and ad hominems like this, a version of "you must be on drugs!" While the Drug Warriors always resort to this "you must be on drugs" attack, the IQ of the Drug Warriors usually seems, based on the quality of the reasoning, to be at least 1SD to the left of the critics of the Drug War.
You should not be drunk on a daily basis anywhere. That is a problem you would be having and now the issue is beyond rights and would be more about getting you help before you cost us all a gazillion dollars in medical costs.
LOL!
Since you reject the philosophy of the Founders as outdated just like the liberals do, what makes you think you're a conservative?
If you want that kind of society so badly, why don't you move there, chump? Oh yeah...that'd get in the way of living in your parents' basement, now wouldn't it?
The quotation was from MY preceding post.
And for the worst of that bunch, as you have said, it's not that they don't know how much social breakdown and chaos their wants would bring - they want it. Malignant desires and malevolence.
Socialist states like Sweden have tough anti-drug laws, as do China, North Korea, and Iran. Why don't you move there?
Define "conservative:"
Someone who, without necessarily having well defined guiding political principles, wishes things to remain as they are. In the United States, things have moved pretty far towards statism, so it's not surprising that the conservative position can be fairly authoritarian.
I don't necessarily subscribe to that, but in alot of instances, it's appropriate.
Being drunk in your home daily would be called a drunk and that isn't good.
That doesn't answer the question. Why do you even bother to post a reply if you won't answer the question?
You should not be drunk on a daily basis anywhere.
You just can't stop posting cowardly nonresponses, can you?
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