Sep 5, 20232 min read

Cheech and Chong's Celebrity Endorsed Chews: Greed and Weed (well Kinda)

Updated: Sep 5, 2023

While I've tried my hardest to avoid doing exactly what I am doing now, as there are an endless amount of companies all using the same techniques, this one hit me in a weird way. Maybe it's the instant success or simply the trust that I know many smokers have for the beloved Cheech and Chong within the cannabis community. Consumers are smart enough to side with a known cannabis celebrity than the unknown competitor. And it's exactly the betrayal of that trust that inspires me to write this article now.

Cheech and Chong's new hemp-based, legal cannabis edibles, or "Cruise Chews" come entirely from hemp. No thank you. Legally sold online and extracted from hemp the only way we know how: Blasting it with chemicals and distilling it down to pure CBD and pure THC. Thirty milligrams of supposed "nano-CBD" and three milligrams of THC are in each gummy or dose. Nano-CBD? "Plus - they’re totally safe: No contaminants. No heavy metals. Just the perfect ratio of CBD & THC" as they attempt to lure buyers with shared rhetoric from quality brands. We will surely be seeing a lot more of this kind of thing with celebrities endorsing white-label hemp-based products made with distillates.

For a hemp based CBD product, the elevated THC levels may make it a better CBD option than other internet deliverable CBD products, but that's like turning a 0/100 to a 10/100 on the quality scales. CBD should always be used with THC (and the rest of the trichome). Their new website that popped up on my Twitter feed starts and ends with "ten things you are going to love about Cheech and Chong's Cruise Chews," but none of them are worth the mention here.

While I love Cheech and Chong, and was just old enough to watch the Cheech and Chong movies during my teens (although it was years after first airing), I had to speak up. They have been making money off of their cannabis celebrity-status for decades, so "sell-out" doesn't really apply, but it's still super lame to see them selling a supposed "cannabis product" made entirely from hemp.

Figuring things have come such a long way from when the solventless method needed massive support, last night's perusal of dispensaries across California came as a major let down. I really thought that every dispensary in the state now carried some solventless forms, but that is far from the case. It appears little has changed in the larger sphere of dispensaries and then they wonder why business is failing. And in spite of this fact, there remains a segment of the BHO community dead set on deceiving consumers into mistakenly thinking their product is solventless, but that warrants another article… Just be careful out there and if it doesn’t say SOLVENTLESS clearly, you can bet your ass it’s not.