2025 Cannabis in Thailand: New Drug War Averted; Economic Boom & Alternative Medicine Revival Highly Probable

Anti-cannabis narrative – that cannabis kills & nobody likes it; that the plant’s harms outweigh its benefits ; that incarceration for production and possession is preferable policy – abandoned.

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Thailand, The Great Cannabis Outlier In Asia, Set To Remain On Top

Thailand decides not to re-criminalize cannabis as it eyes $1bn medicinal industry

1. Thailand will regulate cannabis for medicinal use instead of re-listing the plant as a narcotic, the deputy prime minister said on Tuesday, in the government’s U-turn on its previous policy.Prime minister Srettha Thavisin had vowed to make cannabis illegal by the end of 2024, just two years after Thailand became one of the first countries in Asia to decriminalise marijuana.
2. Deputy prime minister Anutin Charnvirakul said the government would now discuss plans for a draft legislation to regulate the cannabis industry.Mr Thavisin in May said cannabis would be re-listed as a narcotic but now has agreed that legislation was the appropriate step to take, according to the deputy prime minister.

The local and international media has been happy to assist in the manufacture of a cannabis horror show in Thailand. First, stories of spontaneous psychotic episodes. Then death by cannabis and junk science with propositions of cannabis’ highly addictive properties.

Followed by the musty logical fallacies insisting that A) since all abusers of hard drugs consumed cannabis, cannabis leads to hard drugs and b) if minors smoke pot when it’s illegal, they will smoke more pot if it is make legal.

The culmination of the collusion between the media and the Srettha administration was a narrative devoid of data and incapable of responding to objections of the most rudimentary common sense.

It was a vain attempt to place cannabis into a pre-scientific frame. Had the long-term mission of recreating cannabis crime been successful, it would have come at the expense of patients whose quality of life depended on cannabis prior to decriminalization, as offenders would have been aggressively pursued and punished.

It also would have neglected the negative impact on tourism, the food industry and international trade at a time when Thailand is lagging behind Vietnam and Indonesia in all three of these sectors for the first time.

The story of cannabis in Thailand has just begun; the legalization regime is like a new startup, and the “U-Turn” to crime-creation, far from being a dead end, is revealed as a false start — an ill conceived and indecisive step along a loosely scripted road map.