Cheech and Chong’s $100M cannabis empire reveals California’s problems

OG Article By Lester Black Watch today's Episode on YouTube, X, and Rumble.

August 27 2025

California helped catapult Cheech and Chong into the stratosphere of marijuana celebrities. Their 1978 movie, “Up in Smoke,” chronicled the comedy duo’s hijinks across Los Angeles and invented the entire genre of stoner comedy.

But when it comes to cashing in on legal cannabis, the comedy duo has found a winning formula by looking to states like Texas instead of California. 

Tommy Chong and Cheech Marin jumped into the cannabis industry in 2020 by selling pre-rolled joints and smokeable flower, initially focusing on selling their branded marijuana products at dispensaries across California. But by 2023, they had shifted focus to the hemp market, which is federally legal, where they’re now seeing runaway success.

Chong and Marin’s two cannabis companies are on track to make $100 million in revenue this year, up from $50 million last year, with the majority of that money coming from hemp sales, according to a profile in Forbes this week. Hemp is illegal to sell in California, meaning the state’s two most famous stoners are having booming success by avoiding the state. The comedy duo has a deal to sell its hemp drinks at 2,000 Circle K convenience stores across the country, and it already has six hemp dispensaries in Texas alone, according to Forbes.

Hemp and marijuana products are considered cannabis products, but in 2018, Congress carved out hemp as a distinct legal category. This new definition allowed any product that was sourced from cannabis plants with less than 0.3% Delta-9-THC to be considered hemp and federally legal. However, this distinction is usually indistinguishable for most consumers, with both hemp and marijuana products coming in intoxicating products sold as joints, edibles and smokeable flower.

Federal legality has made hemp a much more attractive and profitable industry compared with marijuana. State-legal marijuana companies face heavy taxes, expensive regulations and no access to interstate commerce because of federal prohibition. But hemp companies face almost no regulations and very low taxes, and they can ship their products across state lines and directly to consumers.

Thanks to this disparity, companies like Chong and Marin’s have been moving to hemp and away from California’s market for years as thousands of marijuana businesses go under. Cheech and Chong appear to have mostly pulled out of the state. According to a recent Weedmaps search, their products were available in a few stores in Los Angeles and San Diego but were entirely absent from San Francisco, San Jose and Sacramento.

The comedy duo is still investing in the marijuana market, just not much in California. It has nine branded marijuana dispensaries in Maine, Massachusetts and New Mexico, and it’s selling products in 1,500 marijuana dispensaries across the country, bringing in $34 million in revenue this year, according to Forbes. 

Chong and Marin have also expanded into other mind-altering drugs, like kratom, magic mushrooms and apparently 7-OH, a potent opioid that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently warned “can cause serious harm” and “should be avoided.” They are selling most of these products directly to consumers at their online store. Forbes did not mention how much money these products are bringing in. 

The growing empire is a rare bright spot for celebrity cannabis brands, which have often failed to survive. Marin told Forbes he is looking for a way to parlay the success into an exit, saying he “would absolutely love to sell” the company because “I don’t have enough time out here in the desert to smoke dope and play guitar.”

Success might be calling from out of state, but California’s original stoner doesn’t seem to have strayed too far from his roots.