Cheech Reveals Rigorous Testing Methods for His New Pot Brand

Being a successful brand requires extensive research and development. Richard Anthony Marin knows it—even if his approach to R&D is, well, a bit informal. “We get a bunch of strains, then we go out on my patio and look at the ocean—and then light it up!” he says. “It’s a very hands-on policy.”

Were it any other executive talking about toking up like this, it would be the stuff of scandal. But in Marin’s case, it’s simply what you’d expect. Richard Anthony Marin is better known to America as Cheech, the fast-talking half of comedy duo Cheech and Chong, who, back in the 1970s, essentially created an entire oeuvre out of smoking doobies. And lately for Cheech, lighting up on the patio really does qualify as field testing: Since April, he’s been selling his own line of branded cannabis.

It’s called Cheech’s Private Stash, and the name—just like the signature red knit cap atop the logo—was Cheech’s idea. “Pretty good, huh?,” he said on a recent afternoon on the phone from Los Angeles. “I also invented putting solar panels on the border wall, too. I’m full of good ideas!”

It comes as a pleasant surprise that four decades of pot smoking haven’t dulled Cheech’s comedic timing one bit. But jokes aside, the 71 year-old Cheech has lived to see cannabis turn into serious business. According to data from Arcview Market Research, customers in North America dropped $9.2 billion on the sacred herb last year, and that dollar figure is forecast to hit a staggering $47.3 billion a decade hence.

While national cannabis brands have been slow to emerge—a function of the fact that pot is still illegal in most of the country—it’s hard to imagine a name more recognizable, or one that confers more authority, than Cheech’s.

“You know,” he says, “Cheech and Chong is a magical name that’s kind of endured.”

So it has. Though Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong met in Vancouver in the late 1960s and split in 1985, their material has managed to win a new generation of fans who weren’t even born when their cult film Up in Smoke—a low-budget brain bake that grossed $44 million and established stoner comedy as a genre—debuted in 1978. And while Cheech’s solo career has ranged from children’s books to voiceovers for Disney movies, his name has always been synonymous with weed.