For more than 40 years, Tommy Chong has been at the forefront of our community as a stalwart advocate for cannabis. Now he’s battling prostate cancer – with humor, but also with a deep sense of spirituality.
 
At his home in Hollywood, Tommy Chong saunters out through the glass doors of his bright, airy living room into a quiet backyard sanctuary, lush with foliage and lightly embellished with the iconography of the Far East.
 
Chong is easily one of the most down-to-earth celebrities you’ll ever come across. He’s without pretense, generous with fans, and never abrupt or aloof. Today, as always, he’s in good humor. He’ll often playfully switch into his classic stoner persona. In one moment, he’ll be deep in discussion regarding the range of reading material that he’s relying on to guide him through his ordeal. In the next, he’ll muse in Chong-speak: “Man, I can’t tell you how many different fingers have been up my ass!”
 
Despite the seriousness of his condition, Tommy is relentlessly comical and absolutely unpanicked. He is confident in the treatment choices he’s made – which include cannabis – and works assiduously to maintain a positive frame of mind. An afternoon spent with the comedy legend is a lesson in how to lead one’s life happily and creatively.
 
What was your reaction after being diagnosed with prostate cancer?
It was a slap in the face, man, because I’ve been healthy all my life. I was blindsided. But all they found was, “Ah, there might be something there. Oh, yeah – but you’re okay.” But I needed a biopsy, and they found it. The good news: It’s a slow-moving prostate cancer.
 
Were you angry at all? Like, “Goddammit – this is not what I had planned!”
No, I’ve always been one to figure out ways to put things to my advantage – like what I did on CNN. I was supposed to talk about legalizing pot, but I thought it was a really good time to tell everybody I got cancer. So many people hide it, like it’s an embarrassment.
 
So what was the treatment you decided upon?
My first treatment was with the “straight” doctor. He gave me a pill to shrink the prostate; it’s called Avodart, and it’s a female hormone. One of the reasons you get a swollen prostate is because you’re not putting out enough testosterone, and the prostate starts looking for it. So it starts swelling up, and the female hormone eliminates the need. It’s like a sex change, but you do lose your libido – though when you have cancer, that’s the least of your problems. But then I went to a holistic doctor in Victoria, BC, who put me on a diet of pills: a lot of heavy, concentrated fish oils and concentrated green tea as a supplement ... But I would suggest that anybody who has cancer go to a holistic doctor as well.
 
How are you doing?
My PSA numbers are down to like under two. [PSA is a protein produced by the prostate gland. The higher a man’s PSA level, the more likely it is that he has prostate cancer.] My prostate shrunk. But you can’t really go by the PSA; it’s just an indicator.
 
Your life has been changed by cannabis in three very big ways. It made you a star. It gave the Feds a pretext for sending you to prison. And now it may save your life...
It will save my life! Cannabis is what really connects me with the spiritual world. When I smoke, I head right for the books. I get that spiritual energy going – and let me tell you, there is nothing more powerful than that energy. It’s true energy: You see through everything. That’s when you pick up an instrument and you’ll play the most beautiful music – or whatever you do. You’re connected with the Spirit.
 
I’ve got such respect for the plant. It really is God’s gift to us. I’ve got such respect, such reverence – literally reverence for it. It’s been with me when I had absolutely nothing, when I was literally sleeping on the floor in a friend’s house. But I had that bud with me, and that’s all I needed. I remember my first wife caught me messing around, and she kicked me out of the house. I took everything I needed: my record player, my records and my bag of weed. That’s how I am; that’s all I needed. I had my music and my weed, and I didn’t need anything else.
 
Has your diagnosis made you more spiritually inclined?
I’ve been on a spiritual kick ever since I first smoked pot. But I got out my healing books. Then I got on the Internet, because I kept hearing these “pot cures cancer” things. So I checked that out. I started doing the cannabis oil – only a little bit, though. The first time I did too much, and I was incapacitated for two days.
 
I wanted the possibilities of cannabis as cancer medicine on everybody’s mind. That’s why I went on CNN and said it – because I wanted to reach the right set of people. This is a medicine; it’s an effective medicine. Now my holistic doctor, he wouldn’t okay the cannabis. I asked him about it, and he really didn’t answer me. [Laughing] He’s worried about his medical license.
 
What other treatment are you undergoing?
The cure that I’m really using is water. See, the prostate is down there with the plumbing, and the one thing that one doctor told me when he checked me was that I was water-deficient. He taught me: about four or five big eight-ounce glasses of water every day. The magical cure is water. Also, the thing that really feeds cancer is sugar, so you gotta get rid of it. I don’t eat any sugar. Sugar is the worst thing we have.
 
How has your wife Shelby handled this?
She’s a trouper. She wasn’t worried at all. She said, “You’re okay, you’ll be all right, you’ll beat it.” She knows it – and she knows how I live.
 
How long have you two been together?
Forty-odd years. I met her when she was like six ... it was illegal for the first 10 years of our relationship. No, she’s incredible.
 
What’s your relationship with Cheech like these days? Some have compared it to Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, who often had disagreements.
It’s similar. Cheech is like a bonsai tree that grew toward the other side of the hill than me. We’re perfect. We’re opposites. It’s why we get along. I’ll smoke a doobie and get a great idea and call him up. Or I’ll email him and he’ll shoot it back. We’re totally opposite. We get onstage, it’s magical – but our personal lives don’t even intersect.
 
My partner is my wife. She’s my partner in business and in bed and onstage.
 
[image|http://hightimes.com/userdata/22/images/22_122212chong_02.jpg]
 
Let’s get back to your sense of spirituality. First off, do you believe in a prime force in the universe?
Oh, yeah. I believe – in fact, I know – that there’s not a God who judges. There’s no God that rewards you; there’s no God that punishes you. That’s the old belief. That’s the problem with the world today: the belief in a God separate from ourselves. There’s no such thing. It’s the same thing as believing that darkness has power. There’s no power in darkness. Darkness is the absence of light, pure and simple.
 
God is – and anything evil is the absence of God. That’s all. And man really is a beast if he doesn’t activate the part in him that is God. People ask, “Well, what part is that?” It’s the Spirit. You always hear people say, “His spirits are low.” It’s a very true statement.
 
The atheist movement is growing. How do you perceive that?
It’s just ignorance. It’s a very pessimistic attitude. But in a lot of cases they’re right, because the Spirit has many bodies, and only a few of the bodies really connect with the Spirit. It’s for a good reason, too – because if we all knew that we were eternal, nothing would really get done. You don’t do anybody any good sitting in a cave tripping off in the astral world. You’re here on Earth; you can be there, too, but you’ve got to participate.
 
So the atheists have their place. Everybody has a place, and everybody has a job to do. When you get enlightened – if and when you become enlightened – it becomes a very lonely world, because you can’t share this with everybody.
 
Stephen Hawking has said, “The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.” What do you think?
There’s an old joke: A guy wants to know the meaning of life, so he sells everything he has, gives up his wife, his kids, his job. He travels across deserts and climbs mountains to find a hermit. Finally, he finds the guy and asks what the meaning of life is. The hermit looks at him and says, “Life is a fountain.”
 
The guy says, “What? I did all this shit, came all this way, and you tell me life is a fucking fountain?”
 
And the hermit says, “Well, maybe life isn’t a fountain.”
 
How did you gain your sense of spirituality?
What happened to me – long before I took acid, and I had a great, great trip – was when I was eight years old, I went to a Bible camp.
 
I had no idea about the Bible, but I went and got indoctrinated at a nice, pleasant Bible study group that taught me the story of Jesus and all of the biblical stories. They taught me how to pray, and that has stayed with me my whole life.
 
How do you pray?
Well, my praying evolved into meditation, but you can combine. The most important thing about praying is, don’t ask for anything. You’re talking to the entity that created you. He knows – or She knows – exactly what you need. So the only thing you really need is clarity. You need that consciousness. You need to lose all the garbage that’s in your system, your mental system. You need to lose the resentments, all of the things that stop you: resentments, remorse. You want to pray to live in the present – just in the present. Live now, enjoy now, because when you live in the past, it’s wasted energy. Because the past is gone forever; you’ll never get the past again. And the future will never come; it will always be tomorrow. So tomorrow never comes, yesterday’s gone forever, and the only thing you have is the present moment. And if you’re totally in the present moment, you cannot be unhappy.
 
How do you handle the present?
I learned how to do this jumping-ahead thing. I spent a year in the dentist’s chair, getting implants and all my teeth fixed, and as anybody knows, the dentist is a horrible experience. What I’d do is walk into the dentist’s office and think, “I’m just gonna picture myself walking out of here. It’s all done; it’s all finished.” Then, the next thing I know, I’m walking out. I did that when I went to jail, too: I visualized walking out.
 
I had an MRI. You gotta lie still with your arms above your head for 20 minutes. That’s tough. You know what I said? “I’m here; I’m going to meditate. I’m just going to meditate.” I could feel the pain, but I drifted. I said, “Oh, okay – I’m just going to meditate. I know how to do this.”
 
My first night in jail, I’m in a little bunk, surrounded – a guy right on top of me, a guy right beside me. Then I heard the door lock and I thought, “I got nine months of this.” And I start panicking. Then, all of a sudden, a calmness came over me. It was the Spirit. The Spirit says, “Okay, you’re here for a reason.“
 
That’s what I kept telling myself when I was standing in front of the judge. The only phrases that went through my head were: “Thy will be done. Everything happens for a reason.”
 
Weren’t you angry about going to prison?
Nah. I was actually laughing. The thing is, I could’ve gotten out of it. But they would have taken my pride; they would have knocked me down. I would have sold out. Then you’re their boy, and that’s it. The reason I went to jail was because I was telling everybody that their laws are fucked, that there’s nothing wrong with selling a bong – and if I gotta go to jail for that, hey, so be it. I knew what they were doing, but I knew there was cred to get. You get some credibility when you won’t buy that shit.
 
How do you approach the future?
The only thing I really want to do is leave a legacy for my family. I want to write. I figure the only thing I can do by myself is write. I can’t do a movie by myself; I can’t do comedy by myself. The only thing I can do alone is write.
 
As for the cancer, we’re all computers: Some are more adept at using the buttons than the others, basically. We have the capacity and the ability to do everything that the healer would do. We have it! The only thing is, you have to more or less be as pure as they are. You can’t have any carnal kind of thoughts. You have to accept the universe as it really is. You can’t be hypnotized by greed, or want, or lack, or envy. You have to come to the realization that you are eternal: You are eternal spirit. And then you have to realize that the body is our vehicle. It’s like our car.
 
I personally bring it on myself that I can create awareness that cannabis is a medicine. I don’t know how it works, but it is a medicine. It’s a healing medicine – and if I can get that out there, if nothing else, then I’ve done my job.