Dogmatix

They should remove the travel restriction completely. It's inhuman that people born in Thailand with Thai names and speaking Thai fluently or as mother language are not allowed to travel around, as well as denied access to education, healthcare and employment. After the case of the boys in the cave it was revealed that they can even grant citizenship to this people if they pull their fingers out.

When I looked for an appointment back in February for a trip in August I found a few slots open in October and November. Someone suggested logging in every day and waiting for cancellations to pop up. I tried that for a few days but got bored with it. I noticed there were appointments open in Chiang Mai so I booked one of those after checking that it was OK to go to either consulate. So next week I will get a trip to Chiang Mai which I don't mind.

The Thai current account held up well during COVID but now it is slipping away and they don't mention anything about the capital account side but there are definitely net outflows. Let's hope it doesn't get to the 1997 situation. Amidst all this some idiot suggests destroying the slowly recovering tourism industry by imposing dual pricing on hotels. Most tourists are not American or from HK and they are all suffering from falling exchange rates.

https://www.facebook.com/กัญชา-107438294757758 But it looks like FB has taken down the adds for brick weed.

They will be even more upset if legal weed cuts into their sales and bribes from yaa baa.

I know a lot of stories of teenagers who were affected like this where I grew up. Got psychologically addicted and lost motivation for studies, sports and other activities. Some snapped out of it and others didn't and had to accept they had underperformed their potential in terms of getting into good college etc. Legalise it but keep it away from kids as much as possible, although that is difficult. I think the the new stuff you encountered in Amsterdam is exactly what is available in the dispensaries here. The growers have imported seeds from those strains.

It really sucks that they give PRs the pink card designed for stateless minorities who are not allowed outside their amphur with the warning on the back. It also sucks that they are not allowed outside their amphur, despite being born in Thailand and not entitled to any other nationality, not to mentioned lack of entitlement to education, healthcare etc.

But the truth is they are desperate to get the Chinese back and they are the ultimate bottom feeder, zero dollar tourists. When they get rich they don't come to Thailand. They go to Europe, USA and Japan. Anyway as if not offering discounts is going to attract more demand for the same product. Sigh.

Singapore gives its citizens the same passport number for life. I don't why other country's can't do the same.

"Chief Suwat admitted that he was concerned about marijuana but his men were obliged to follow the law. And there simply wasn't grounds for them to stop the sale of weed." If it's not illegal why the concern? Cutting into his income stream? Maybe Thai kids will switch from yaa baa to weed and police income for mansions, luxury cars and overseas educations for their brats will take another nosedive.

If they really didn't want recreational use they would have waited for this new law before legalising. But Anutin wanted to be sure the legalisation got done before the government collapses. The guy on the committee is from his party and it seeme pretty obvious that recreational use is exactly what they do what as they have vested interests. Newin's daughter interviewed by the Beeb on her plantation admitted that recreational use is where the big money is and said she hoped Thai society will not have a closed mind towards this. I am not sure how the new law is supposed to prohibit sales for recreational use. Of course they will ban rolled joints and they may ban any reference to getting high etc etc and only allow references to alleviating back pain and insomnia. But the summary of the first reading of the bill posted by parliament only referred to licensing and banning sales to minors and pregnant and lactationg women. Are they going to demand prescriptions and registration by users? I doubt it because that goes against their own vested interests. One big unknown is what will happen if a Thaksin nominee becomes PM. He would obviously want to recriminalise but his party would need to be able to form a government without Anutin and BJP to do that, as well as get their nominee elected by the Senate - a tall order.

Hopefully this will increase profits of his cronies' marijuana plantations.

These nationwide delivery services are a nice touch but I wonder if it is a good idea to have your personal details stored in a dispensary. We don't yet know what we happen over licensing and some may fall foul of licensing laws when they come out or not get them. So they could be raided and all personal data taken away by cops. Also there is a risk that a Thaksin nominee will become PM and reverse all or some of the liberalisation.

On the Ganja FB page in Thai I see kids bricks of compressed weed for B3,900 a kg brick. So that's B3.9 a gram. Also joints for B30-100 each.

"Charoensak was clearly very drunk and his eyes were all glazed indicating that he had been smoking marijuana, " There is no evidence presented for this ridiculous assertion. Just more fake news to bring legalization into dispute, like Chardchat's pathetic lies about the overdose death and underage overdoses. All turned out to be fake.

The woman is an extremely low quality proxy for her father. She even had to cheat in the entrance exam to get into Chulalongkorn. Daddy ordered someone from the Education Ministry to get to exam papers out of the safe and make copies for her to enhance her preparations for the exam. There was a big hoo haa from parents of kids who were deemed to have failed the exam and rejected, accusing this woman of stealing their kids' places. The only thing a Thaksin proxy can do is push for an amnesty for daddy to come home and some massive corruption schemes like Yingluck's rice pledging scheme. Please get this toxic family out of politics for ever and let Thaksin come back only as ashes.

I am not saying that agents and lawyers are all thieves. Many people find them useful and the competent ones do a good job preparing documentation and advising on how to go about the application which is worth the price. But there are some that always insist an under the counter payment is needed, even when it may not be, and I have heard from people who paid up and felt they got no benefit and felt their agent probably pocketed the bribe. I approached a lawyer before I applied and the first thing out of his mouth was it will cost a lot in under the couter fees but it turned out he knew almost nothing about the process. I think a lot of the skuduggery goes on with Chinese applicants, since they sometimes hit the annual quota of 100 per nationality which allows Immigration to select who will go through. I was once many years ago in the office of a Mandarin speaking Pol Maj Gen at Immigration and he had a queue of Chinese outside his door, whom I was told were all interested in obtaining PR. In the citizenship office of Santiban you can sometimes see Chinese speaking agents waltzing in with their clients and acting like they owned the place.

Without doubt the logjams in the PR and citizenship queues was loosened up by Anuphong soon after the coup. There is documentarty evidence of this regarding citizenship in the form of a announcement made by Anuphong with the first batch of new citizens gazetted under his watch. These were women married to Thais, who don't need to make the oath or have HMK's countersignature. So Anuphong was able to proceed directly from his own signature to the Royal Gazette announcement. He referred to the fact that many had been waiting for an excessively long time and also obliquely referred to the scam I mentioned above, saying he was announcing the names of new citizens publicly immediately to prevent them from being taken advantage of by people saying they could get them on the list they were already on. About the same time Anuphong started approving the backlog of PR applications. We all know anecdotally that corruption was not eliminated by the coup government and many claim it actually got worse. So it would not be surprising if demands for cash appeared in the PR or citizenship processes, even though both were certainly streamlined and made more tansparent by the coup government. However, it still seems that the average applicant for PR or citizenship has been able to get through the entire process without using a lawyer or agent or being subjected to demands for cash. Since the coup government reduced waiting times which is still the case, the temptation to offer bribes to cut the lengthy waiting times that used to prevail is no longer there. However, there will always be exceptions to any rule.

This guy did his research and got help from a police general from another department with connections to the top cops at Immigration or their bosses. He said he saw his file with the name card of the police general pinned to the front page with a handwritten note on it. But this was back in the Soi Suan Plu days and I am not suggesting things are the same or recommending people to try this themselves. Also, as I said, this was a guy who loved showing off his bureaucratic connections and really wanted to pay, even though he was well qualified for PR. In the event he got some small convenience for his money but not real advantage. If you want to pay, there is always someone wiling to take your money. For PR and citizenship it is often just your lawyer or agent who pockets all or most of the money.

To clarify I think what people meant by saying the interview takes place after the application is accepted was that the formal interdepartmental panel interview takes place after the acceptance. Of course you have informal or semi-formal discussion with the officers at CW about your application while you are applying but that is not strictly an assessment of your Thai and as Anthony said, you may have a Thai spouse or other helper with you at CW. Re Misty’s comments I recall applying at the same as a friend back in the Soi Suan Plu days and he was very proud of his wife’s police general friends. He got one of them to put in a good word for him which was not free of charge. The result was that he got only one brief discussion about his application compared with the two in depth discussions I got, one of which was quite hostile and unpleasant. For second “interview” he just waltzed in and showed the police general’s name card and was told all was in order and he could go, while I got the second degree. But we both got our PR about the same time, although he got his a couple of months before me. Of course things were very different then and there was no Thai language requirement or interpartnental panel meeting. But my impression is that, like then, there will always be applicants who want to pay and find a way to do it, particularly Asian business people who are used to having to pay bribes to get things done in Thailand. They may be treated a bit better like my friend was but it is unlikely to speed up the process much or get someone through is not fully qualified because there are too many people from different departments looking at the applications. My friend had a direct connection to a police general but most of those who pay only deal with their lawyers or agents and It’s a fair guess that a good percentage of these crooks don’t hand over the whole bribe to officials or maybe keep all of it for themselves. A few years ago there was a scam for PR awhere the MOI delayed the public announcements of new PRs which allowed police to tip off lawyers and agents in advance so they get in the phone to clients to claim there was special quota for those willing to pay 200k at a time when PR was taking 5-7 years (for good reasons). Those who paid got no benefits as they were already on the announcement list. They were just ripped off by their lawyers and agents who probably kept most of the bribes for themselves. The current minister made clear he was eliminating this disgusting practice by eliminating the long lead time between internal and public announcements of new PRs and citizens.

I noticed that a ganja FB page in Thai has sprung up. A lot of young Thais, including students, are offering product for sale and delivery at prices far less than the dispensaries. I have seen 3,500 for a kilo brick of pressed weed and loose joint offered at 30 baht for regular and 100 baht for premiumfancy grade.

Basically there are no legalities to opening a dispensary yet because the Cannabis and Hemp Bill that will legislate licensing and other matters has only passed its first reading in Parliament and may not be passed during this government's tenure.

I guess the stuff in the picture at Big C is kitchen ganja but Green Lab now has the real stuff at fancy prices with names like Destroyer on its website. Perhaps Big C will distribute that in future too.

It was an old revolutionary decree from a military government that had fallen into disuse but Thaksin revived it.

Sukhumweed offers delivery for 50 baht on its website but I have been told distpensaries are backing off from online sales for fear of being accused of selling to under 20s. When I went past Sukhumweed on Saturday night there were a lot of motorbikes parked outside. I think people are sending motorcycle taxis to buy the weed for them. If you have a regular motorcycle taxi you can trust, that might be a good solution.