Why Thailand legalized marijuana — and then almost banned it again

In sticky, sweaty Bangkok, there seemed to be more weed shops than there were Buddhist temples — and there were a lot of temples. Some shops were decorated with psychedelic art on the walls, beanbags laid out over the floor and ambient music playing; others were little more than just wooden table stalls in the middle of the street. I found one place selling Scotty Pie hybrid strain blunts for 480 baht (>$13) whereas a simple roll of Thai weed will only set you back 100 baht . The budtender unscrewed a jar to let me sniff the fresh aroma, but since rolling a joint for me is like solving a Rubix Cube, I bought a pre-rolled Thai and went on my merry way.

On 9 June 2022, Thailand made history as the first Asian nation to lift the ban on cannabis after decades of prohibition. The plant was removed from the list of dangerous narcotics, and although casual consumption technically remained off-limits, nobody, not even the cops, seemed to care. Thousands of prisoners were set free that very day. It was de-facto legalization.

Then Thailand threatened to revert course yet again. The opposition made cannabis a wedge issue in last year’s elections, and having stepped into power, nearly backtracked on the reforms that made the Thai kingdom a pioneer in Southeast Asia.

Thailand has one of the world’s longest relationships with weed, locally known as ganja. Having likely made its way to Southeast Asia from India, for centuries the plant wasn’t motivating teenagers to spray their rooms with Febreze before their parents walked in. Instead, it was mostly used as a herbal remedy for various ailments as well as a savory condiment for meals, including the famous boat noodle soup served in the floating markets of Bangkok’s canals.

That said, the intoxicating side of weed was not forgotten, either: the word “bong” itself – meaning a bamboo water pipe for smoking ganja – is Thai.

“How is it?” asked Arun ‘Max’ Avery over a bowl of ganja-spiced soup at his café, Highland, in northern Bangkok, where we’d met at opening time (4:20 p.m.). “There’s a certain flavor, a certain taste, that makes you want to keep slurping, right? That’s what the cannabis does. There was one time – this is pre-legalize – my girlfriend was throwing a party for like 20 to 30 people, and I brought this pot of soup that’s as big as this refrigerator. We threw in like two or three whole chickens and two whole plants of cannabis without flowers. And I kid you not, the pot was empty but two whole chickens were left. People were just slurping up the soup. That’s how delicious it was.”

Weed was originally banned in Thailand under international agreements in 1934, but enforcement was very relaxed. Then during the Vietnam War, TV footage of American GIs sucking reefer smoke out of gun barrels alarmed the top brass. At the time, the Thai Stick variety of ganja – the buds wrapped around a small bamboo stick like a green kebab or a cigar – enjoyed a reputation as being the finest in the world, much of it grown in the fertile soil of the impoverished northeastern province of Isan along the Mekong River marking the border with Laos. Thailand, as America’s ally against communism, came under pressure and the war on drugs truly began. Under the 1979 Narcotics Act, cannabis distribution could now earn you fifteen years in the slammer.

“When I was young, before the Americans came, we were free, you know,” artist Piak Lexhip reminisced. Lexhip is perhaps the closest equivalent the kanchachon (“ganja people”) have to a Cheech and/or Chong, being the inspiration for a character in the cult classic novel Mad Dogs & Co. by author Chart Kobjitti. He is now eighty years old, and has been smoking since he was fifteen. “You had opium to breathe. And then [in the] 1960s they have a war in Vietnam and the Americans come. Before you can smoke in town and like the doctor, you know, Thai medicine. But then Americans come and they have a law.”

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Cannabis can help treat conditions such as epilepsy, and parents risked imprisonment procuring medicine for their children from underground pharmacists. It didn’t matter if you had a tumor the size of a football – if you were holding a Thai Stick, you were going to jail. The prison population climbed from around 20,000 in the ‘60s to 330,000 by 2015, the majority serving hard time for drugs.

Then in 2014 the military seized power in one of Thailand’s clockwork coup d'états, and even the generals were growing concerned with the overpacked prison cells. A window had finally opened for reformers.

Before becoming a café, Highland began life as a Facebook page, later evolving into Thailand’s equivalent of High Times magazine. Avery told me how they’d lobbied for legalization.

“We started by talking about the benefits of cannabis – whether health-wise or politics or social life,” he explained. “Our team decided to organize the first 4/20 [April 20th] event, which happened to be a conference at a university, and we got a physician, a political figure and a policeman there to talk about cannabis. That kind of took off, and then the Ministry of Public Health started holding conferences about cannabis and its benefits, so we started attending those and that’s how we got all the way to influencing the officials in parliament, to a degree.”

Highland’s seminar at Bangkok's Dhurakij Pundit University in 2015 was a turning point. The debate gained even more traction the following year, when Dr. Somyot Kittimunkong published a book on cannabis and cancer that helped sway public opinion.

Then in 2018 the reigning junta finally allowed medical marijuana as a “gift to the Thai people.” The following year elections were held for the first time since the coup and the Bhumjaithai Party (BJT), led by construction magnate Anutin Charnvirakul, ran on the legalization ticket, winning votes from struggling farmers in Isan. Charnvirakul was appointed health minister and on 9 June 2022, pushed through the reforms.

The Highland crew were among those cashing in, opening their own café, which now serves everything from native Thai and hybrid strains to ganja garlic bread.

“We told every grower to ship [their weed] on or after midnight,” Avery remembered. “We didn’t pay them yet because we didn’t have that much money. And sure enough, that night, we started weighing and packing until like 4 a.m. The store opened at 9 a.m, and of course we needed to be here, so we had only a couple hours of sleep. People were lining up just to get the first legal cannabis. We invited reporters and sure enough, they came that morning. We had no less than thirty reporters just hanging around just trying to take a picture of the first legal cannabis buyer.”

A multi-billion baht industry materialized literally overnight. On paper, all sales were for medicinal purposes only, but the streets of tourist hubs — like the party island of Koh Phangan and Bangkok’s Khaosan Road — were liberally lined with dispensaries proudly proclaiming themselves with large, green, neon signs. Restaurants and cafés served weed-flavored dishes and drinks and Charnvirakul himself was spotted slurping a ganja-infused curry. There were stoned yoga classes and blunt-rolling workshops. PlookGanja, a government app offering registration for aspiring cannabis growers, crashed after being flooded with over nine million applications.

But the initial euphoria quickly gave way to a moral panic. It may have once been tradition, but millions of Thais had nevertheless grown up only hearing that ganja is a “dangerous drug” (conflating cannabis with stronger drugs like meth) and the new, 420-friendly climate left them uncomfortable. Reefer madness re-emerged in the press: such as a March 2023 case in which a 23-year-old Bangkok man was admitted to hospital for a “marijuana overdose,” during which he crashed a stolen ambulance.

Part of the problem was lawmakers were too hasty in pushing ahead legalization without regulation, leaving a wide open goal for both prohibitionists and the opposition eager to score easy political points.

“I don’t want my children to grow up in a country where drugs are easy to find and cannabis is liberalized,” Paetongtarn Shinawatra, leader of the Pheu Thai Party (PTP), declared at a campaign rally. “We need to suppress drugs.”

Shinawatra is the daughter of media mogul and ex-prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who in 2003 launched a Duterte-style war on drugs in which the police summarily executed 2,500 suspected low-level drug sellers, of which over half were later found to be innocent. The drug trade itself was left largely unaffected, and Shinawatra himself was deposed in yet another coup in 2006.

The PTP sabotaged a bill put forward by the BJT that would have created some oversight over the industry. Despite Charnvirakul saying he’d only join a coalition that will back his party’s regulation proposals, after casting his vote in a shirt decorated with bright green ganja leaves, the BJT entered a coalition with the PTP, with the PTP’s Somsak Thepsutin appointed as the new health minister earlier this year. Somsak vowed to reverse his predecessor’s policy by reclassifying ganja as a dangerous narcotic, allowing it only under strictly clinical conditions.

Suddenly, Thailand’s 4,500-odd dispensaries, plus their farmers, investors, customers, suppliers and budtenders, were in a precarious position. A government survey claimed 80% of the population wanted a repeal, and a committee convened in early July 2024 to ponder the matter. Should Somsak’s proposals have gone into effect, ganjapreneurs would have had until New Year’s Day 2025 to close up shop.

Thailand’s cannabis community didn’t take the news lying down. Another activist group, the Thai Cannabis Future Network, staged a sit-in outside the Government House in Bangkok, accusing the health ministry’s doctors of colluding with politicians, using re-criminalization as a ploy to monopolize the industry. The activists demanded the government thoroughly examine the evidence and if the findings showed cannabis is no worse than alcohol, it should be regulated rather than outlawed. Two of the protest’s organizers, Prasitchai Nunual and Akaradet Chakjinda, even went on hunger strike. After five days with no food, Chakjinda was hospitalized.

It was a close call. On Tuesday July 23, now-Deputy Prime Minister Charnvirakul announced that criminalization was called off; instead, the government agreed to go forward with regulation and would hold meetings with relevant stakeholders. It’s still unclear what would happen with recreational cannabis, which is still formally illegal; however, with a ganja economy estimated to be worth over $1 billion by 2025, it seems unlikely they’d totally sideline this cash cow.

“These new events prove that this [criminalization debate] was all about politics,” Avery reflected. “[The PTP] were flexing their power because there are people who, for whatever reasons we can gossip about, don’t want it legal. The police want their dirty money again. Initially, I did have a bit of stress in terms of the worst-case scenario that could happen. But it wouldn’t make sense, and Anutin wouldn’t let that happen. But how was he going to pull that off? I didn’t know at the time, but this week we found out and that was to [threaten to] pull his party from the coalition.”

The Thai Cannabis Future Network called off their hunger strike and thanked the government and the BJT.

“This success is the result of the collective effort of every individual involved: the visible and invisible supporters from the academic, political and public sectors. Your [BJT’s] contributions have been instrumental in this significant achievement,” they said in a statement shared with me. “We urge cannabis enthusiasts and the public to closely follow the drafting process of the Cannabis Act from this point forward, as this law will be crucial in shaping the systemic structure for cannabis regulation in Thailand. The Thai Cannabis Future Network will persist in driving our action plan until the Cannabis Act is approved by Parliament and comes into force.”

Avery isn’t certain about the exact future of Thai cannabis, but believes it will remain rather like it is today except perhaps with stricter rules about licensing, while Anutin gets to be the hero for both liberalizing cannabis and bringing it under control.

It’s too early to tell whether Thailand will be like Washington or Colorado, kick-starting a domino effect across Asia. My guess is probably not yet – recent events show cannabis’ standing is precarious even in Thailand. But stoners in Japan, Nepal, Indonesia and elsewhere can take heart in the fact that despite heavy pushback from powerful interests, legalization has not totally failed.

There’s been another interesting development. In April, the Thai authorities quietly eased restrictions on opium and psilocybin "magic" mushrooms, allowing them to be used for medicine and research, signalling yet more potential drug reform. But whether there will be more backlash in the future remains to be seen.