LOWERCASEGUY

This is an urban myth. People have a tendency to confuse "less addictive" with "not addictive" because it suits their purposes. Here is a paper from the University of Notre Dame. I think it's pretty hard to argue that one doesn't build a tolerance to weed over time which is one of the three criteria. And ask any stoner that's ever taking a tolerance break if they have withdrawal symptoms, that's two criteria met. While you can easily find a third critera in withdrawal from personal/social relationships or having a strong desire to reduce or cut back on usage, continuation of use despite the presence of adverse effects is going to pretty much be on a lot of heavy stoner's lists. So, if that's the medical definition of addiction, we just proved that cannabis can be addictive. I’m not anti-weed, I’m a daily smoker, however, I am anti-BS, bro-science about weed. Throwing out easily disprovable information doesn’t help the cause, bro. Too many people that couldn’t locate the liver in an anatomy book doling out medical facts like they’re doctors. Ahh, the old, Thais are poor theory. You know Thais can grow weed, right? They don’t have to buy it if they can grow it or steal it from someone who grows. And nowadays, a lot of Thais make way more than some expats that live here so the poverty angle isn’t as compelling as it might have been 20 or 30 years ago when most Thais were truly in or close to poverty. You should really read the Thai-language news because there is almost a daily story about this or that shop getting busted for selling kratom juice and cannabis to minors. Apparently, Thai youth like to mix THC and cough syrup too and they’ve made several big busts for that too. Nothing you’ve said negates the fact that most medical research indicates that the human brain doesn’t not finish development until around 25 and that cannabis use prior to that can have negative effects on development and cognition. That’s pretty universal in every market that has legalized weed and even some of the loudest proponents for cannabis say that it’s not appropriate for young people. Whether it’s addictive or not is not relevant in that context. Again, I’m not anti-cannabis, I’m highly supportive of it and involved in the business. But there are plenty of valid reasons to restrict the availability of cannabis to people under 20. The problem the Thai government has is that given the current status of cannabis, it’s very difficult for the police to do anything. Weed isn’t illegal. Possessing it if you’re under 20 is illegal. But since it’s not a narcotic, the penalties for both possession and selling it to a minor are wrist slaps which isn’t an effective deterrent. You also need to keep in mind that Thais see the issue very differently than the typical foreigner that goes on social to ask why it’s being made illegal again. Thais are overwhelmingly against recreational use. I mean, almost 90% kind of overwhelming (google some of the NIDA and other polls). The government is giving the people exactly what they’re asking for. Thais LOVE medicinal use though. I remember when one of the first cannabis clinics opened (a real clinic in a hospital, not a dispensary), I saw Thai people from every age group and economic class waiting for cannabis therapy. People would roll up in a brand new Mercedes and the next guy would be on a Honda Wave that was older than the driver. I saw little old Thai ladies and young people lined up for cannabis therapy. Even my (Thai) wife is crazy about CBD gummies and takes one with her multi-vitamin every morning. The real reason they’re trying to roll back legalization is that it happened too fast and too big for most Thais. You went from this plant being an automatic jail sentence to a dispensary every 100 meters on every street. Too many shops that went with the stoner graffiti look and catering to the dregs of society. Mind you, I’m not suggesting all cannabis users are dregs of society, stoners, or any other term that could be construed negatively. But I can tell you there are shops that cater to different segments of the cannabis market and many of them went straight to the lowest common denominator. Ironically, the lowest common denominator customers are the drug addicts you claim don’t exist.

I can't speak for PrikPot but online ordering has been illegal for over a year. Many shops keep taking online orders but I have noticed more and more have shuttered their online sales or moved everything over to a less visible platforms like LINE or Telegram.

The cheapest thing. you're going to find that is in any way even remotely accurate is a Purple Pro which retails for around 100,000 baht in Thailand (closer to $2K in the US and other markets). They don't sell these machines on Lazada so you'll need to contact a rep on Facebook or LINE and inquire about purchasing. The other popular testing rig is the GemmaCert which, IIRC, runs around 200,000 or 250,000 baht.

10g isn't wholesale. LOL They might call it wholesale in order to pleasure people into thinking they got a great deal but let's just put it this way, if they're not asking you for your dispensary license, you're not buying wholesale. It can be a little confusing because the places you mentioned have retail and wholesale. In my experience, the growers that also sell retail tend to have the highest wholesale prices because they don't want to communicate how much they're making on retail. In other words, if I'm selling OG Kush for 500 baht a gram retail and wholesaling it at 120 baht a gram, you don't need a math degree to figure out the profit margins (plus the fact that 120 baht a gram still has profit in it). But if they price it at 250 a gram wholesale, that doesn't seem as bad. Wholesale under 100g is normally going to be between 100 - 200 a gram. But I've seen very nice looking buds, maybe not top top shelf but decent, for 100 baht a gram wholesale. But the norm is usually more like 120 or 150. I would laugh at anyone trying to get 200 baht or more a gram during slow season. I've seen really good outdoor/greenhouse organic for as low as 35 baht a gram for smaller buds up to maybe 70 for really nice looking buds. And, of course, you can pick up the basic stuff like Thai Stick, Green Crack, KD Koh Tao, etc for as little as 5 baht a gram for crappy looking, improperly cured, dried out weed. This is often the stuff used in prerolls in tourist areas where they're selling joints for 350 baht a gram (do the ROI on that - LOL). Lastly, I would add that the word "top shelf" has been so overused and abused, not just Thailand but in every legal market, that the term is meaningless. Same with Exotics. I've seen people selling basic stuff like Jack Herer as exotics. I've even seen people selling popcorn and calling it top shelf. LOL. If you use the word "top shelf" you might as well type "lksjdfa;lskdjflo;kadsflksjdfs" because it means the same thing.

Keywords in that sentence are: maybe and soon. First off, if you heard about it you probably read about it via a story that was based on a government press release where it was stated: The decree also aims to enable the growth of magic mushrooms in designated universities and educational institutions across four regions of Thailand. Institutions approved for the project will be those deemed ready to embark on experimental projects to create anti-depressants from the extracts of magic mushrooms. That seems to indicate that the cultivation of mushrooms is being allowed for very specific research purposes. So your odds of finding it everywhere in Pattaya seem very low.

Your account info says your account was created in the later half of 2021 so you probably haven’t been in Thailand long enough to have noticed that Thailand isn’t really known for suggestion boxes. Remarkably, in a country quite used to fielding 40 million tourists a year, your opinion of things in Thailand holds almost the same level of importance as the numbers after 3.14 in pi, technically they exist but for all practical purposes, nobody cares. This is a country where they don’t bend over backwards to make the customer happy, rather they sue people that leave bad reviews under Thailand’s rather ridiculous defamation laws. If it’s any consolation, you gave me a good laugh.

Kitty is a xenophobic idiot. I can't even count the number of times she's flown off the handle and posted multiple hysterical posts about some new law and then someone reads the actual law in Thai and realizes she can't read. She used to run her father's law office and she's on par with any poorly educated lawyer. She posts about laws the way many drunk people read this forum. They read one sentence that sets them off the deep end and they start writing a nasty, hate filled response and never get around to reading the rest of the post which clarifies. And the real comedy in all of that was she was advising foreigners on how to get set up in Thailand with a cannabis business. Her talking about greed is the cherry on the cake though. She was gouging the hell out of customers and then she found out she has competitors who weren't willing to do the same and she started crying foul. Yes, she was selling 1234 baht buds, because she thought it was funny. She was still carrying 1,000+ baht buds the last time I stopped in her shop a few months ago. My guess is that only half the problem in the market right now is imports. The other part is massive overproduction by Thai growers. I rarely hear about imports anymore. They're still out there but once the local supply issue got resolved, there was no longer a reason to buy imports for many shops and a lot of that market dried up. I really think she's deluded on this topic and she attributes her own lack of success to these outside evil forces rather than the fact that she is simply not a good business person. She's too interested in pushing her personal brand. She's doing workshops to tell other dispensary owners how to run their business. She's drafting new cannabis laws that nobody will even bother looking at. She's writing essays like this. She's in the Kitty business, not the weed business. I don't think she understands that nobody cares about Kitty when they're looking at a 1,234 baht bud.

Bro, the Thai-Indian multi-millionaire that paid Cookies a ton of cash to license the name is running that. Cookies announced a partnership with Sukhumweed and then found out that they could only own 33% of a Thai company and suddenly became interested in licensing the brand to some sucker.

Sorry, but let’s say that it you read other news sources that won’t get your post deleted on AseanNow you may see some different analysis. They may say something like this: The party is aiming for more than 120 MP seats at the upcoming general election on May 14 compared to the 51 seats that they won in the previous election in 2019. One can do a little simple math and see that if BJT gets anywhere to even close to 120 seats they will be a dominant #2 party. PT can either bring them in as an ally or they can make a strong enemy. I’m assuming the reason why they don’t get the same news coverage as PT or MF is because PT has to win by a massive landslide to form their own government (most analysts say they won’t come close to a landslide) and MF and PT are courting similar voters. So PTs success means MFs failure and MF success costs PT seats. And "Bhumjaithai will likely gain the most seats among the parties in the government coalition," Wanwichit said, predicting it could win more than 70, including from rural strongholds in the lower northeast. Wanwichit Boonprong is a political scientist at Rangsit University. This was in Reuters. There are dozens of similar references. I can find a reference to BJT’s expected “second largest party” in pretty much every Thai news outlet. Honestly, I don’t know why some Thai news sources go so far out of their way to only focus on PT, MF, and the Dems. Perhaps that’s the more exciting race to cover. BJT has Buri Ram and a lot of other races already locked up and a lot of MPs that won their seats in other parties have moved over to BJT for the upcoming elections which make them easy wins for BJT. For most Thai political pundits, PT #1 and BJT #2 are a lock. The only question is how big each party will be and whether any of the other parties pick up enough seats to become major players. Interestingly, there are several scenarios where PT doesn’t get the PM slot. There are a lot of unelected votes that are not thrilled about another Shinawatra in the PM spot and have already said they’re not voting for anybody who would bring instability. That could force PT to align with BJT to get enough votes to overcome that opposition and they may have to give up the PM spot to BJT in exchange for getting the prime ministry roles. And another scenario is BJT cobbling together enough parties to put Anutin up for the PM slot. Either way, most paths to the PM seat go through BJT after this upcoming election. This is why PPRP has already had meetings with BJT and PT keeps denying they’re talking with BJT (saying that it’s too early for that). Most political pundits picked PT to win by a landslide back in Jan but they aren’t polling as well as they would need to win by a landslide so now the Thai media is speculating at what coalitions will be forced together in order to form a government. And BJT will be a critical party if they get anywhere close to the 70 seats pundits expect them to get and the 120 BJT is aiming for.

BJT is widely expected to be the second largest political party in terms of number of seats held and a potential roadblock to any other party trying to form a government. PT will be the only larger party but they actually have a lot of problems in forming a government because of the possibility they try to being Thaksin back to Thailand.

You know advertising cannabis is illegal, right? From what I’ve seen, it’s created a lot of related business. For instance, I was looking at a display case in a furniture shop and the salesperson asked if it was for a cannabis dispensary because she said she’s been selling tons of them to weed shops. Sign companies, POS systems, commercial rentals, printers, packaging, etc, etc. Growers are buying lights, nutrients, commercial properties to indoor grow, etc. Look at it this way, if there are 3,000 new dispensaries and they each employ an average of 3 people, that’s 9,000 jobs that pay better than average. I see jobs being advertised for Thais that start at 15,000 and go up to about 30,000. Plus all of those businesses need legal and accounting services and various other products and services to operate. My guesstimate, and what I’ve heard informally thrown around by cannabis business owners, is that it costs about 1 million baht to open a decent dispensary. If you’re talking about something like Wonderland, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re in for 5 million to 10 million. So let’s say that each shop spends, on average 1.5 million to open their shop, with 3,000 shops, that’s 4.5 billion baht that entered the Thai economy. That’s not even including growers and increased tourism.

My apologies to POC.

So, what you’re saying is, the law wouldn’t have protected him? Yes, all kinds of bad stuff can happen to you. You could be arrested, kidnapped, tortured, etc but that was not OP’s question and it’s just a bunch of barstool lawyers saying, “Well, you should cower in your home 24/7 because bad things might happen.” It’s legal to fly with cannabis domestically. The NCB and AOT have gone on the record in the Thai media. Theres no law that says it’s legal because that’s not how legal systems generally work. They tell you what isn’t legal and everything else is legal. There’s no law that legalized cannabis. Thai parliament passed a law removing cannabis from the list of controlled substances. Thats what made it legal, being removed from the list of things deemed illegal.

You can doubt all you want. It's just a sign that new information doesn't sit well with you if it conflicts with your POV. I pull the weed out of the bag because I keep my weed and my smoking stuff together in a smaller bag (carbon filtered smell proof) inside my main bag. I also have a dry herb vape and carry the extra 18500 batteries for it in the smaller bag with the weed (the actual dry herb vape I keep separate because it's too big to fit in the same bag). So when airport security asks me to take the batteries out of the bag I just open the bag and empty it so they can see there aren't any other batteries in there. I am way more concerned about getting my dry herb vape confiscated than I am worrying about the weed. What I stated was that laws, generally, don't say what you can do. Laws, generally, say what you can't do and people understand that anything not prohibited is allowed. So, my take differs from yours in that you claim that it's neither legal or illegal and in some sort of limbo legal state where you could be busted. I have said that it was removed from being illegal which is the same as making it legal without there being a specific law that says it's legal as someone else was asking where there was a specific rule/law saying it was okay to take cannabis on a domestic flight. There would be no need for such a law because once cannabis was removed from the list of illegal narcotics, it no longer was prohibited. I don't understand why this is such a hard concept for you to grasp. By your definition it is neither legal or illegal to carry a pen on a flight because there are no laws saying it's legal to carry a pen. That's why courts generally interpret laws to assume if something is not illegal, it is by definition legal. Thailand's constitution indicates that Thailand operates under this same premise: Basically, anything not prohibited is assumed to be legal. So cannabis on domestic flights is not some sort of limbo state. It's not prohibited so it's assumed to be legal. The NCB and AOT have confirmed this line of thinking. The only people arguing otherwise are farangs on ASEAN Now. LOL. COULD happen under some circumstance. LOL. This really sums up your entire position. You're scared of imaginary situations. Guess what, you could also be pulled off the street and executed by the police. It COULD happen.

Goal posts being moved again. TM30 was a law that was in the books but wasn’t enforced. There are laws against littering. Their enforcement is sporadic. Immigration offices have different interpretations of immigration law and apply things differently. The police could enforce the no smoking law but they can’t change the law. What you’re suggesting is that the cops could make up a law that doesn’t exist.

I’ve been coming to Thailand on and off for over 20 years and have lived here almost 10. I’m quite aware of how the laws and Thai system work. Like I said, I’m also involved in the industry and regularly talk with lawyers and Thai lawmakers.

It’s great when you can move the goalposts whenever facts get in the way. You can remain as skeptical as you want. But your position sounds rather comical. What other things do you not do in Thailand out of fear of imaginary police persecution?

That’s not how laws work. Either something is expressly allowed or it is expressly forbidden. Cannabis is neither. That doesn’t make it legal or illegal. It simply isn’t illegal. Where does it say that you can bring a football on a flight? There is no link because no airline is going to make a list of everything you can carry on a flight. Instead they have a list of expressly prohibited items and cannabis is not on that list except extracts. So if someone wants to claim that it’s illegal, they need to show evidence. It should be relatively easy to find. Someone, somewhere must have mentioned it in the media if it was illegal. I have both reached out to most of the major domestic airlines and they have all said they have no rules against cannabis. I have also flown with large quantities of cannabis in my carry on and shown the weed to security and they’ve said nothing. In fact most of the time they smile. The burden of proof here is not on me. It’s on anybody saying anything other than it’s legal to fly with cannabis.

The important part there is the phrase “can lead to”. This is the same law for cigarettes. The police are first to give a warning. This was so misreported in all media, Thai, International. They mostly listed the maximum penalty that was possible for multiple violations. It’s like saying that if you break a traffic law in the US, your license can be permanently revoked and you could serve jail time. But that’s not the penalty for a first offense. Nor is it even the penalty for a second offense for a serious traffic violation like DUI. That’s usually the penalty for 3 or more DUI violations and dozens of more minor infractions. A lot of confusion is because the journalists are: a) Writing clickbait headlines. b) Are rewriting what a Thai media source said about it hour fully understanding the topic.

I will and I have.

Since I’m pretty sure this source isn’t allowed on ASEAN Now, here’s a quote from an article. You can copy and paste it into Google. “Passengers who wish to bring legal cannabis or cannabis products on domestic flights are advised to pack it in their checked baggage. The reason is that cannabis items carried on board must be inspected by staff from the Narcotics Control Board and would cause a delay during security checks.”

Why do I have to provide a link for you when it’s literally on thousands of websites. Google “AOT Thailand cannabis domestic flights”.

Yes, I live in Thailand. I’m also involved in the industry and have plenty of lawyers.

The issue with the laws is exactly the opposite of your fear. There is no law. That’s what the cannabis bill fight in parliament is all about. The people that legalized it want to pass some laws that will put some restrictions on it. The opposition parties don’t want it voted on before the next election so they can campaign on recriminalizing it. AOT has even published guidelines as to their policies on cannabis on flights that they formed based on discussions with the Narcotics Control Board. On around June 13th of last year I called all the major domestic carriers and asked them their policy on cannabis on flights. Everyone that responded said the only policy is that it has to meet the luggage requirements.

What would be the charge? Cannabis is no longer a controlled substance.