If you spend enough time with Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong, America's best-known pothead entertainers, you'll hear enough stories to realize why the duo became comedy legends.
Consider this gem: Sometime in the late 1970s, after Marin was wanted by the FBI for dodging the draft during the Vietnam war, and after Cheech and Chong became household names, the Los Angeles native dropped acid with the king of turning on and dropping out—Timothy Leary.
"[Leary] had this great blotter acid," says Marin, 79, while sitting in his home office near Joshua Tree, California.
On Matador Beach in Malibu one night, Leary taught Marin all about the stars and constellations while the LSD took hold. Marin had visions of cave men looking up at the stars and telling stories about the figures and shapes they saw above. And that's when he had a revelation: "You could connect with a whole history of people looking up at the sky," he says. "It was a moment of we-are-all-one by this fact that we're in this universe that we can identify."
He also learned one of the best tips for surviving the early days of the war on drugs from Leary's fifth wife, Barbara. Marin asked her how to disguise a sheet of acid while traveling and she wrote a phone number and address on it. Now, it was just a piece of paper with a woman's information. "A good smuggling trick," says Marin.
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