This article was originally published by Cultivated and is republished here with permission.
Sawadee krab!
I was in Thailand this week visiting my wife’s family and I had to satisfy some professional curiosity and see what was going on in the country’s cannabis market for myself.
I’ve been coming to Thailand regularly for over a decade, and no matter where you are in the country — the beautiful tropical islands down south, the tropical forests of Chiang Mai, or the urban jungle of Bangkok — cannabis is always widely available.
Thailand first legalized medical cannabis in 2018 and decriminalized broader cannabis use in 2022.
Licensed and unlicensed shops flourished across the country similar to the early days of New York’s legalization where illicit sales went mostly un-enforced. In tourist and expat-dominated areas, you practically come across a new shop every block.
In June of last year, the government reversed course forcing all cannabis back under a prescription-only, medical regime.
There’s a funny detail in all of this: Thailand’s Prime Minister, Anutin Charnvirakul, a former business executive who leans conservative, was one of the early leaders of the push to legalize cannabis in the early 2020s.
But like we are now starting to see in the US, the pushback to the widespread, loosely-regulated cannabis market became too severe for the government to not react.
There was international pressure too, as legally purchased Thai cannabis was illegally exported to other Asian countries like Singapore and Indonesia, which have strict no-tolerance policies (Indonesia still considers the death penalty for drug cases, which is as shocking as it is cruel).
As Prime Minister, Charnvirakul helped spearhead the July 2026 Cannabis and Hemp Act which permanently bans recreational consumption and mandates medical-only sales at existing cannabis shops.
These shops are theoretically supposed to have …
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Author: Jeremy Berke / High Times
