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.
Harris built Jerome Baker Designs starting in the Grateful Dead touring circuit, where functional glass was already its own underground art form. He scaled it into something that transcended the counterculture. Collectors. Gallery-level craftsmanship. A real company with real employees and real revenue.
Then the Attorney General of the United States held a press conference about it.
“It felt ideological,” Harris says. “Like we were part of a larger agenda being pushed at the time. It wasn’t just about enforcement. It was about making an example out of a certain culture.”
“It felt ideological. It wasn’t just about enforcement. It was about making an example out of a certain culture.”Jason Harris, founder, Jerome Baker Designs
Nobody Is Fighting For The Pipes
The cannabis industry that emerged from that era has spent the years since fighting for the plant. Rescheduling. Banking access. The 280E tax problem. State-by-state legalization. Real wins, real money, real infrastructure behind the push.
“Paraphernalia has never had a unified voice,” Harris says. “There’s no real trade association, no serious lobbying presence, and nowhere near the level of funding that cultivation or retail has had.”
He is not wrong. The Federal Drug Paraphernalia Statute makes it unlawful to sell or offer for sale drug paraphernalia, use the mail or any facility of interstate commerce to transport it, or import or export it. The operative question is intent: whether an item is primarily intended or designed for use with a controlled substance. Bongs are sold openly across much of the country. Under federal law, though, selling or moving one across state lines can still carry real risk.
“Laws change when there’s money and organization behind them,” Harris says. “Until major corporate players see value in backing reform and building that infrastructure, it’s going to stay overlooked.”
That is one of the quieter scandals in legal cannabis. The culture that built the industry is still operating in a legal gray area the industry has not bothered to fix.
“Laws change when there’s money and organization behind them. Until major corporate players see value in backing reform, it’s going to stay overlooked.”
Jason Harris, founder, Jerome Baker Designs
What He Lost
When Harris describes what he lost in 2003, he does not lead with money.
“The biggest thing I lost was momentum,” he says. “When you’re building something at that scale, it’s not just the business. It’s your rhythm, your forward motion, your sense of purpose. That all disappeared overnight.”
Seventy employees. Four million dollars a year. A brand that had become synonymous with a certain level of craft and intentionality in functional glass. Gone, not because the market didn’t want it, but because the federal government decided the culture around it was the problem.
He spent years rebuilding. Quietly, deliberately, without the recognition the industry probably owes him.
“I don’t really look at it in terms of being owed anything,” he says. “What matters more is that people understand where this industry came from. The risks people took. The culture that built it.”
Why New York, Why Now
New York is where he has chosen to make his return, and the choice is not arbitrary. He has been building relationships there since the early 1990s. The market is enormous and genuinely diverse in ways that matter to what Jerome Baker represents. The timing, with New York’s legal market finally maturing and the Hulu documentary generating attention, made sense.
It also means building again under the same legal shadow that took everything from him the first time.
“There’s something about operating in that gray area that feels rebellious,” he says. “It’s a little dangerous, a little raw, almost like street art. That’s where this culture has always lived.”
He is not nervous. He is also not naive. The law has not changed. The risk has not disappeared. He is choosing to operate anyway.
The Ritual Of Glass
Harris has always talked about functional glass in terms the mainstream cannabis industry tends not to use. Ritual. Community. The smoke circle. The bong as an object with weight and meaning, not just a delivery mechanism.
“It’s not just about the product,” he says. “Functional glass is one of the purest ways to consume cannabis, but it also carries a sense of ritual, intention, and artistry that gets lost in a more commercialized market.”
The industry has more consumption options than it has ever had. Vapes. Edibles. Pre-rolls. Every format optimized for convenience and discretion. Harris is not arguing against any of that. He is arguing for something that tends to get lost when convenience becomes the only value.
“Glass connects you to the moment in a different way,” he says. “It’s tactile, it’s visual, it’s communal.”
From A Jail Cell To Hulu
Bong Voyage is a 20-minute film on a major streaming platform. That is not where cannabis culture would have expected to find itself in 2003, when the Attorney General was on television announcing that the government was coming for it.
That is the distance. Not legalization. Not normalization. The actual distance between a jail cell in Eugene and a Hulu premiere.
“No matter what happens,” Harris says, “you can rebuild, you can evolve, and you can keep pushing forward doing what you love.”
The law hasn’t caught up. He’s not waiting for it.
