What If Chihuly Signs It?

Let's talk about bongs and insane drug-paraphernalia convictions!

I have never used a bong. I'm not even sure I know what a bong is exactly. But I love saying the word bong, and I know I'm not alone in that.

It often surprises people to look at me and hear me say that I have never used a bong. But there are two good reasons. One, all my hippy friends in the sixties and seventies had plenty of rolling papers. And two, I've never liked marijuana anyway. It makes me cough my lungs up and by the time it gets me high I'm too sick to enjoy it.

Still, I'm of the age to have had all those hippy friends, and yes, my children, I did inhale. Just not from a bong.

But I've looked at a lot of them. Some are very artistic. I've learned a little from looking at them. As best as I can tell, they are pot-smoke delivery systems. That, I believe, is a principal defining characteristic of a bong.

The other thing that I have learned from looking at bongs is that you don't need to buy one to smoke pot. Let's say worse comes to worse and you are desperate for a toke from a bong. I have learned that all you need to do is procure an ordinary legal pipe for smoking tobacco and make minor adjustments to it, and that will do just as well.

Because of all that, and the ready availability of the afore-mentioned rolling papers, I am absolutely certain that no-one has ever failed to smoke pot due to an inability to buy artfully crafted bongs on the Internet.

Can you imagine someone saying, "Oh golly, now that Tommy Chong has gone to federal prison for making and selling glass bongs on the Internet, I can't buy his wonderful glass bongs, and therefore I won't smoke any of this evil grass that I have purchased on the black market through other sources?"

Let me be clear on this. I don't know what Chong's bongs look like. I don't know that they are as artistic as they've been made out to be. I don't know that Chong himself ever had anything to do with making them either. All I know is he lent his name to the selling of bongs and the feds busted him for it and he's gone to prison for what could be nine months, barring an appeal, and that's totally insane.

Let's suppose the public service ads are true and that smoking marijuana kills people like flies in a zapper. It would still be the marijuana that did it, not the bongs.

So why do we have a law against selling bongs? Because this whole country has gone freaking bat-spit nuts, that's why.

It's gotten so that I don't even have to look for absurdity anymore, it finds me.

For the last two years the administration has been telling me that the most important thing in the world for Americans to worry about is this country's security. Because of the need for security we had to go to war against two other countries. We had to pass a law making it legal to wiretap anybody and never tell them we did it or why.

We've always been told, at least since the Truman administration, that one of our needs for security is the need for good intelligence as specifically provided by the CIA and its undercover agents. And by the way, if they're undercover, it's for our blessed safety as a nation, right?

But when a right-wing columnist outs a CIA agent the Justice Department looks the other way for months, even though our security has presumably been harmed by it.

Meanwhile an old comedian gets nine months for capitalizing on a stale joke. I wouldn't mind so much if they'd just stop lying and telling me it's for my own good.