The federal paraphernalia statute that helped send Jerome Baker Designs founder Jason Harris to jail is still on the books. Twenty years later, he is relaunching in New York anyway.
In 2003, John Ashcroft went on national television to announce that the federal government had just targeted the functional glass industry. Jason Harris watched it from a jail cell in Eugene, Oregon.
“I was sitting in a jail cell watching the Attorney General of the United States talk about what we were doing,” he says. “That’s when it really sank in that this was bigger than just a legal issue.”
Operation Pipe Dreams was the federal government’s coordinated crackdown on the functional glass world. Fifty-five people indicted. Tommy Chong, among them. Harris, among them. Jerome Baker Designs, the company he had built into a $4 million annual business with 70 employees, was gone overnight.
That was 2003. It is now 2026. The Federal Drug Paraphernalia Statute that made Harris a criminal is still on the books, unchanged. And Harris is relaunching Jerome Baker Designs in New York.
“It’s definitely risky,” he says. “But it’s also invigorating.”
Bong Voyage And The Culture That Refused To Disappear
Bong Voyage, the short documentary chronicling Harris’s story, premiered April 20 on Hulu as part of Jimmy Kimmel’s 4X20: Quick Hits anthology, the same collection that includes a film about High Times and its founder, Tom Forçade. The pairing feels fitting. Both stories are about the same thing: a government that came for the culture before it came for the plant, and a culture that refused to disappear.
Also read: Jimmy Kimmel Made a Hulu Doc About High Times, But It’s Really About Free Speech, Its Director Says
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Author: Javier Hasse / High Times
