Thai Ganja Digest
Lessons for Thai cannabis from Canada’s failure, great Thai cannabis guides from local outlets, THC Death Porn, and UN as purveyor of anti-cannabis misinformation.
Links to Consider
For more on cannabis in Thailand, upcoming events, cannabis legal reform, Thai dispensaries, reviews of clinics and their strains, check out Town Hall, the info hub that I manage as Chief Content Officer at Cannabox, a tech startup here in Thailand.
1. At his Cannabis Management Review on Substack, Mitchell Osak laments the failure of Canadian cannabis. Similar to what Thailand is still trying to do, Canada’s legalization is nationwide and operates under a Cannabis Act.
Thailand will revisit its Act in late May. Policymakers can learn much from the Canadian fiasco and its government intervention that has slowed growth in the sector to near standstills.
Most industry watchers probably know by now the Federal Government’s latest budget did virtually nothing for our beleaguered yet large, growing legal cannabis industry. This is shameful as well as totally stupid from a public policy standpoint. I don’t want to rehash the same compelling rationale for lower taxes and regulatory reform nor supplicate myself any more than others have.
2. Cannabis guides in The Thaiger are underrated: Cannabis news with no hype. No clickbait. No scare tactics. Just valuable info that assumes the recent scientific consensus on the medicinal properties of full-spectrum cannabis.
3. The Thaiger strikes again with a piece on a local dispensary. Notice how cannabis normalization occurs as the store is discussed like any other. In addition, the product offered connects with affordable cannabis and the healthy hobby of growing at home.
4. The details of this local story seem straightforward; nevertheless, it must be noted that the tale of kids eating cookies and gummies with THC and being rushed to the hospital fits with a pattern in local reporting.
The Royal College of Paediatricians of Thailand, and the Paediatrics Society of Thailand raised their concerns just weeks after the decriminalisation of cannabis on June 9 last year. They reported a spate of serious health-threatening, cannabis-related cases, involving a 3 year old child and several other children.
It appears that these stories follow a formula that, no matter the details, will imply that THC is a grave danger to children.
It isn’t. Other articles in this category have included the word “deadly”. THC is not deadly. Cannabis poses no health threats. Of course, there are exceptions to the latter. And those are the ones that generate this new bogus genre of what I will call “THC Death Porn”.
5. I think this is a new category of modern stress: The worry that after you leave a country where cannabis is legal, you could be identified as having THC in your bloodstream and taken into custody. “If other people are proven to have taken drugs in your home, you are likely to face criminal charges for accommodating others to take drugs. You could face three years or more in prison.”
6. In the criminalization of tourism news, imagine being deported from China for using cannabis in Thailand.
7. These two links go together: Cannareporter piece is a reminder of the UN dipping its toe into anti-cannabis rhetoric – something I mentioned last week. It is conceivable that the UN is collaborating with the US in order to save the US from international embarrassment of appearing trapped in a contradictory framework that scuttles global cannabis growth.
Some at the UN seem to want to forget that we got here after 60 years of international cannabis prohibition that caused more harm than good. Perhaps the most documented failing of the war on drugs is also its greatest indictment -- the corruption it incentivizes. “The war on drugs is a game; it was a very fun game we were playing.”