I just spent a few days in Bangkok on the way back from Indonesia to the UK and it was suggested by an old colleague that the person i should speak to about the reality of cannabis in Thailand is, activist, former lawyer, policy maker and much more, Kitty Chopka.
Only two days after our chat the Thai PM came out with this announcement.
Kitty has been on the ground in Thailand shaping policy and ideas but also running a business.
We dig into the politics, what is and isn’t allowed and how much we should believe announcements like the one we just heard from PM Thavisin.
Chokwan, or Kitty, grew up in Australia in a very liberal family. After graduating with a law degree, she soon managed a law firm, but burned out quickly. She spent a few years soul-searching, then her mother helped convince her to tackle the issues around cannabis. After exploring possibilities of starting a business in the US and finding it wasn’t feasible, she did get to work with an advocacy group on the humanitarian side, which led her to set up Elevated Estate as a cannabis-focused startup incubator in Thailand. This organisation aimed to play a supporting role in helping to build the cannabis/hemp industry in the kingdom, but was not sustainable due to lack of funding, constant changes of regulations and Covid, and now concentrates on her brand, Chopaka, that sells cannabis buds and gummies. She continues to advocate for cannabis in terms of business, policy, human rights and social justice, or simply responsible and safe use. She views that cannabis has enormous economic value and various beneficial uses, and wants to call upon governments to adopt more progressive views about the plant and its powers.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kitty-chopaka/?originalSubdomain=
Tatler Asia
A longtime advocate and campaigner for the legalisation of cannabis, Kitty Chopaka is in pole position to capitalise on Thailand’s burgeoning industry. The delisting of the plant in June 2022 enabled her to legally sell cannabis flowers and support local cultivators around the country through her eponymous startup. She previously founded Elevated Estate, a cannabis-focused expo, incubator, fund and consulting company, and was chief marketing officer at advocacy group Highland Network.
https://www.tatlerasia.com/people/kitty-chopaka
BBC
“It is messy, but then this is Thailand, and without this sudden liberalisation I don’t think it would have happened at all,” says Kitty Chopaka, founder of Chopaka, a company that offers advice on the marijuana industry, and has been a part of the parliamentary committee trying to get the new regulations passed.
But this is not the kind of liberalisation long-term campaigners like her dreamed of.
“We need regulation. Spelling out what you can and cannot do,” Ms Chopaka says. “It is causing a lot of confusion, a lot of people not knowing what they can do, what they can put money behind.”
There are some rules in this apparent free-for-all, but they are being enforced haphazardly, if at all. Not all dispensaries have a licence, which they are required to have, and they are supposed to record the provenance of all their cannabis flowers and the personal details of every customer.
No products aside from the unprocessed flower are supposed to have more than 0.2 percent THC, the psychotropic chemical in cannabis, nor can they be sold online. Yet you can find suppliers offering potent weed brownies and gummies with high THC content online, with delivery to your door within an hour. Cannabis cannot be sold to anyone under 20 years old, but who is to know if the product is simply delivered by a motorbike courier?
There are restaurants serving marijuana-laced dishes, you can get marijuana tea, and marijuana ice-cream. Convenience stores are even selling weed-tinged drinking water. The police have admitted that they are so unsure of what is and is not legal they are enforcing very few rules around marijuana.
