Thailand’s tourism marketing is often headlined with the phrase “Amazing Thailand”. In fact, if you open the website of the Tourism Authority of Thailand, those words are the first thing you’ll see. They are a reference to the country’s magnificent natural beauty, its exquisite cuisine, and its perennial ability to surprise visitors in all sorts of ways. Now, the government wants to do something that would be really amazing, the regulatory equivalent of getting toothpaste back into a t
a tube. It wants to get back in control of an industry that it let get way out of hand: cannabis. Specifically, its latest proposal, the second go by a Thai government in less than a year, would restrict the use of cannabis primarily for health purposes, scientific research, and as an ingredient in food and cosmetics. That would rule out its use for recreational purposes and put thousands of retail shops and dispensaries on the brink.
But there is something implicitly less hard-line about this latest proposal: while the first draft legislation circulated at the beginning of the year explicitly ruled out the use of cannabis for recreational purposes, this one has a nuanced change. The wording that explicitly outlaws recreational use has been removed, and instead, the permissible uses are spelled out. So while this second round of draft legislation doesn’t explicitly eliminate recreational use, it does so only by implication.
In a country where people are so adept at exploiting loopholes, and where enforcement is weak anyway, the latest proposal looks like a weakening in the commitment of the government to do much about it.
Cannabis is a cottage industry
That will please many, if not all, participants in Thailand’s weed industry. Thailand decriminalised marijuana use in 2021 and delisted it as a narcotic in June the following year. That was the signal for the mushrooming of the cottage industry with huge investment in cultivation and processing at the back end, and by some estimates the opening of more than 10,000 weed shops and dispensaries, concentrated in the tourism destinations of Bangkok, Pattaya, Phuket and Chiang Mai. Shop space wasn’t difficult to come by: mid-2022, the time of the delisting, was at the trailing edge of Covid lockdowns that decimated small businesses. Many of the weed shops appeared in spaces previously occupied by restaurants and other retail and entertainment venues that were put out of business.
There’s virtue in trading quietly
The pushback against recreational use was to some extent inevitable as complaints escalated about the corollorary effects of the weed shops, which often brazenly marketed themselves with trappings that a lot of people, including the politicians who had caused the mess in the first place, didn’t like. To some extent, the regulatory blowtorch is something the industry has brought on itself. It did its business loudly and brazenly. There were weed cafes, weed spas, weed festivals, and weed gentleman’s clubs, often advertising themselves with flashy shopfronts that many found offensive. The location of many of the shops in tourism enclaves was not coincidental: Thailand, already a tourist Mecca, found itself with yet another carrot to tempt international visitors. And they came and they smoked.
But now the backlash has set in and the government is scrambling to get some modicum of control over the industry.
Details still to come
The initial proposal in early 2024 put out by the coalition government led by former Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin’s Pheu Thai party explicitly outlawed recreational consumption and limited its use to medical and health purposes only. The proposal had teeth by instituting significant fines for both users and sellers. However, Mr. Thavisin was ousted in September and his government was replaced by a new one headed by Paetongtarn Shinawatra. The latest cannabis proposal is therefore the work of a new government and some of the details, such as the fines and jail terms for transgressors, are as yet not clear.
There are other significant details that aren’t clear either. For example, cannabis extracts with more than 0.2 percent of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the psychoactive part of the cannabis plant that creates the recreational ‘high’ will still be banned for recreational use as per the earlier proposal, but will the flower, which is not considered part of the cannabis ‘extract’ and typically exceeds the 0.2% threshold still be available?
Thailand will survive cannabis regulation, but will all the retailers?
In the meantime, the tourists keep coming and by the end of October Thailand had welcomed more than 29 million visitors from overseas for the year so far. With the high season hitting full gear, the target of 35 million for 2024 was within touching distance. It isn’t clear how many of them come to Thailand partly or primarily because of the easy availability of a smorgasbord of weed varietals, but it would be more than a small number judging by the patronage of the retail shops.
Not all of the retailers will survive though if the new proposal is passed into law and strictly enforced. But enforcement is always an issue in Thailand. Ideas are always plentiful but putting teeth into regulations is quite another matter.
On the other hand, regulating the dope industry would be consistent with the oft-stated desire of the Thai government to bring in ‘better quality’ tourists, meaning, those who bring a fat credit line and spend their money in places that are more highbrow than weed shops and weed restaurants in the ghettoes of Pattaya, Bangkok and Patong. Examples of more highbrow places would be glitzy resorts and hotels, and let’s not forget Southeast Asia’s top malls, including the likes of Emporium, Siam Paragon, Central World and IconSiam.
Anutin Charnvirakul, the Deputy Prime Minister once declared “We cannot let people come to Thailand and say because it’s cheap”. Of course, one of the things that brings so many people to Thailand is exactly that: value for money is outstanding. And the dope is cheap too. Perhaps it won’t be though for much longer, because if the regulations do get tightened in 2025 as the government wants, prices are bound to rise.