After 50 years of collaboration, Cheech and Chong are now just an hour away from your doorstep with their new statewide delivery service.  

While Cheech and Chong’s Takeout will share the pair’s name, Chong will be taking the lead. He is one of the most experienced celebrities in the space.

Chong sat down with L.A. Weekly to explain how his years in the game led to his latest venture. 

“Originally, we were going to do the dispensaries like everybody else, but then the lockdown came in; then we hooked up with this guy that had access to the takeout, and it just made sense,” Chong told L.A. Weekly. 

Chong went on to point out that the normalization of getting things delivered to your house is basically moving at the same rate of getting cannabis in the moment. He pointed to Amazon as an example. He hopes to be just as convenient. DSC00455

“New York has had takeout forever, you could order a pizza and weed and get the weed a lot faster than the pizza,” Chong said of his buying experiences. “And so we’re going to go use the same method. I’m just so stoked with it because there are so many people that are stuck in their homes, especially during the pandemic. And for other reasons, too, you know, not everybody has the ability to go to dispensaries.”

Chong noted that even if those folks could go to dispensaries, the operators haven’t always had the opportunity to set up shop in the nice part of town, even if the data shows dispensaries make their neighborhoods safer. 

For years, Chong and his partner-in-crime Cheech Marin walked separate paths in cannabis. Eventually, an offer was put in front of them that made sense to take things official for the duo when it came to selling cannabis together. 

“We’ve never had a problem being Cheech and Chong,” Chong laughed, talking of the deal that continues their collaboration into its fifth decade. 

Chong is having a good time watching the continued wave of normalization of cannabis continue to make its way across America. He compares the debates around cannabis still happening to those that businesses were having in the 1980s about whether they needed computers. These days it’s a laughable concept. 

Chong has dealt with more adversity than most in the cannabis space these days, and that was just for selling bongs. He served nine months in prison from 2003 to 2004.  

“The first thing I did when I got arrested was made the point that I’m not a rebel,” Chong told L.A. Weekly. 

Chong noted he once spoke with Robert Shapiro after living under federal restrictions for three years. Shapiro explained how he would have won the case, but admitted he was surprised with the play the feds threatened to make against Chong’s family if he fought back. 

We asked Chong what the moment was he wanted to join the industry in the early 2010s, roughly a decade removed from his ordeal. 

“I felt everything was good after I woke up in prison,” Chong replied.

He woke up that first morning and understood the reality of the situation and looked forward from there.

“Before you get incarcerated, there’s – you’ve always got some kind of hope that something good is going to happen and they’re gonna find out it’s all a mistake, and you always got down, till but when I woke up in prison as it really happened, is really, I really had. So that’s what I mean. Then I knew I was right.”

Again, Chong fell back on his lack of rebelliousness, and his military training made it easy to follow orders while he waited for the day he left prison. Now 18 years later, he’ll have weed at your door in less than an hour.  

 

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