A Soft Drink With a Hard Sell

The Great American Free Enterprise System has given us so many wonderful gifts. We’ve got sneakers that light up. We’ve got cheese in aerosol cans. We’ve got inflatable sex dolls and glow-in-the-dark crucifixes and lawn ornaments shaped like the butt of a fat lady bending down to pick weeds. We’ve got Spam and Twinkies and Trix and Kix.

And now we have a new addition to this pantheon of Great American Stuff:

Bong Water.

In 12-ounce, long-neck bottles. Labeled with a picture of a skull and the slogan “Stoned to the Bone.”

Bong Water is a new soft drink invented in Merrillville, Ind. It contains a lot of delicious ingredients--high-fructose corn syrup, sugar and “Natural & Artificial Flavors,” and a heaping helping of caffeine.

What Bong Water does not contain is actual bong water.

This is good. Bong water is water from a bong. A bong is a pipe that filters marijuana smoke through water. As many a dorm party animal can attest, water in a well-used bong gets pretty foul pretty fast.

Many dumb college students have tried to get high by drinking it. But there’s no recorded instance of anyone trying it twice. It’s that foul.

But Bong Water doesn’t taste like bong water. “It’s a citrus, grapefruit, guava taste,” says inventor Ira W. Scott, chief executive of Real Things Distributing. “It’s sweet and strong. It really reeks--but it’s a good reek.”

The name is “a name people could recognize without a lot of advertising,” said Scott, who named the various flavors, such as Ganja Grabe and Banana Spliff, after marijuana-related slang.

But any doofus can bottle fizzy sugar water and name it after goofy dope slang. Where Scott exhibited his genius is in the marketing, the hype, the spin. Scott is actually touting Bong Water as--get this!-- a tool in the war on drugs.

“We are urging our customers to respect their bodies and minds,” he writes in a news release, “and are pleased to offer Bong Water as a cool and satisfying alternative to underage drinking or participating in the drug culture.”

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Now, this is some inspired spin. In fact, it’s a full 360-degree spin, a dizzying, double-reverse spin. You’ve gotta admire a guy who can say this stuff without laughing. Obviously, Scott is a great American salesman.

“I’ve been in business since I got out of college,” says Scott, 37. “I’ve been in investment banking and mortgage banking.”

But not always successfully, he says. He was convicted of the sale of unregistered securities in Indiana in 1992 and sentenced to 15 months of house arrest.

After that, he says, he became a forklift repairman. He saved $2,200 and used it to start his Bong Water business. His first batch was brewed only a few weeks ago. It’s available around Indiana and Chicago.

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Meanwhile, in an effort to jump-start public interest, he issued a news release allying Bong Water with the anti-drug efforts of Barry McCaffrey, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

He didn’t inform McCaffrey’s office about this, however. McCaffrey aide Steve Panton said he’d never heard of Bong Water--or of bong water, or bongs, either, for that matter. He promised to get his boss’ reaction to Bong Water. The next day, Bob Weiner, McCaffrey’s official spokesman, issued a terse statement: “He was given no authorization to use Barry McCaffrey’s name or to associate his exploitative marketing strategy--making light of drug paraphernalia--in some way with our efforts against drugs. The question is why the press gives credence to these efforts by publicizing them.”

The answer is, of course, because we cover American life--the good, the bad, the ugly and the merely absurd. And because it’s August and there’s no news. And because Ira W. Scott gives new meaning to the old Yiddish word chutzpah.

The dictionary says chutzpah means “shameless audacity”--true but inadequate. That definition is usually augmented by an old story: Chutzpah is the quality displayed by the kid who killed his parents and then asked the judge for mercy because he was an orphan.

Similarly, chutzpah is the quality displayed by the man who names a soda after dope, markets it with the slogan “Stoned to the Bone,” then claims it’s an anti-drug product.

Is this a great country or what?