LOWERCASEGUY

I love when people come to a conclusion that everyone else is already aware of and think they're the first to discover it.

Even his “to sum up” is four paragraphs.

Hate to break it to you but one of the bigger complaints expressed by people in the weed business in NA is “lab shopping” which is where growers shop around for the labs that will report the highest THC levels. The only thing that is “strict” is the requirement to get the weed tested.

So you want a turnkey weed business with someone providing you with weed suppliers and accessories? Might be a better question for a paid consulting firm. Most of the people with contacts are dispensary owners. Most dispensary owners probably aren’t too keen on creating more competition.

Try here. https://www.thailandthc.com/places/category/chiang-rai-cannabis-dispensaries/

Apparently, not found on Soi Cowboy were paragraph breaks. ???? I think the problem with looking at a particular location on a particular day is that, police busted sellers on KSR, then a few days later they busted sellers on Thong Lor, then a few days later they made some busts on Soi 11. Seems they pick and choose when to conduct their checks and different police districts have different chiefs so it’s not all coordinated.

Try: https://www.thailandthc.com/places/category/khon-kaen-cannabis-dispensaries/ Or https://weed.in.th

The vibe on Soi 11 has been undergoing change for decades. Not sure why you would find that surprising if you go there often. Why should they? It’s legal. LOL, why? Does weed taint the pristine atmosphere of prostitutes and ladyboys that hustle every corner of Sukhumvit between Nana and Cowboy?

Importation of cannabis is still illegal. I assume that what you mean by the situation being ridiculous here is that you can’t afford buying weed here and want to ship cheaper Canadian weed?

Then why not just say that and not jump on the "Buy Thai Weed" train? Thai weed can use PGR too. I've seen PGR weed that was grown here. I think you're losing people when you mix PGR with buy local. Buying local is preferred but not when it costs 2x - 3x what imported non-PGR weed sells for.

First off, I didn't say cancer causing weed is funny and I know you know that. I was referring to the logic that only Cali weed can be PGR and that the only way to avoid PGR weed is to buy locally grown weed. Here, let me help you out a bit. Not all Cali weed is PGR and not all Thai weed is free from PGR. It's a very simple concept. The entire premise of your post that we need to buy Thai weed to avoid PGR is fundamentally flawed. Man, that would really be good for your argument if your ad hominem attack that I was a dispensary owner, was accurate, Unfortunately (for you), I am not. I am working with a group of Thai and foreign private equity investors and the reason I've met so many growers and dispensary owners is for investment purposes. I would actually benefit if everyone only bought Thai grown weed since I have no financial interests in Cali weed but do have financial interests in Thai weed. So, maybe, keep your speculation about me to yourself and just address the facts. Please show me the economics of how legal Cali weed, even sold at retail shops in the US, at an average price of around $15 per gram can still be more expensive than Thai weed at retail. California, IIRC, is a seed to sale state meaning that the state requires monitoring and verification of every seed all the way through growing and ultimately to the point of sale. Also, dispensary and grow startup costs are astronomical. If you're looking to start a dispensary in California, you might as well not even begin thinking about it unless you have at least $2 million for licensing fees, securing a location (which you have to lease before you can even apply for a license), price gouging by landlords that rent to weed businesses (rents are usually double than for any other use), legal fees, and, ahem, "lobbying fees" (yes, many dispensaries have to pay 'legal' bribes to get their applications approved). Labor at every step of production and sale in California is magnitudes higher than Thailand. And land is much cheaper. California is one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world. That means the growers or land owners are pricing the cost of the land into their pricing models. Plus the state taxes at every step. And, the retail price includes the cost of lab testing the weed. Yet, you can walk into any dispensary in Cali and easily find $15 (570 baht) grams, all day long. In Thailand, the average price, across all dispensaries is closer to about 650 baht (there are still plenty of shops with 900+ baht weed out there to drive up the average price - and places like Kana Pure are charging almost 3,000 baht a gram for Thai grown weed, LOL). I just don't see the economics of how Thai weed is more expensive. It's cheaper to illegally import and it sells for cheaper retail even with the massive amount of overhead costs that are a fraction of the cost in Thailand (labor, land, etc). And many of those tens of thousands of small growers are: 1. The most likely growers to use pesticides, PGR, and other bad growing techniques because they're unable to achieve economies of scale required to get prices down so they need to juice their returns/yields a bit. 2. The most likely to grow <deleted> outdoor weed which even you won't buy. So, they're growing the outdoor weed you won't buy but we're supposed to reward Thai growers that grow indoor weed, who are primarily more affluent Thais? Do you see the error in your own logic? That is why I disagree with your entire premise in this post. Nobody deserves your business. It should be earned. I don't care about Thai growers and Thai growers don't care about me. How capitalism works is that if Thai growers want my business they will offer a quality product at a fair price. Your logic is that because of this fake PGR propaganda we should just pay whatever Thai growers are asking because, for some reason, it's important to support Thai growers who are already affluent. Maybe you'll now better understand my beer analogy. You made it clear that you don't think we should buy Chang because it's owned by a huge Thai conglomerate. Yet, you won't buy outdoor weed in Thailand which is most likely grown by small growers which means that you indirectly advocate buying weed from rich Thais. So, you have a standard of quality that many small Thai growers can't meet yet this is exactly who you imply is benefitting if we buy Thai grown weed. But, in actuality, the type of weed that you buy is much more likely to be grown by affluent Thais. How is that radically different from my beer analogy? And, you adding in the stuff about microbreweries is the part that irrelevant because microbrewery beer is not a commodity the way weed is. At the end of the day, the vast, vast, vast majority of consumers only look at two things when buying weed, price and THC level (all other factors being equal like sativa, indica, etc). If you show someone a gram of OG Kush grown by an expert grower and a gram of OG Kush grown by an amateur grower, 90%+ of consumers can't tell the difference and wouldn't pay a premium for the better grown OG Kush. Beer is very different. Chang, Leo, and Singha all pretty much taste similar. They are the commodity end of the market. Microbrews are specialty crafted and people seek them out. Thailand could have a similar industry but they don't currently and probably won't for awhile as it will take awhile to create the right genetics to produce a unique taste or experience. I would love to see some local Thai strains that are world class. But right now, most of what is local Thai strains is the low end of the market (brick weed, green crack, Thai Stick - which isn't even really Thai Stick since those genetics were probably lost during the drug war). It's like if a brewery made PBR (Pabst Blue Ribbon) and called it a microbrew. But as long as Thais are selling OG Kush, Train Wreck, Do Si Dos, Purple Punch, etc, it's a commodity. And, like any commodity, the only thing that separates one Purple Punch from another is price. Buying good Thai weed is simply making the rich richer for no apparent reason. Bottom line is that nobody should be selling PGR weed. If a dispensary carries PGR weed, locally grown or imported, they should be shut down (or denied your business). Once that anti-PGR propaganda is off the table for discussion, what are we really talking about? Giving Thai growers a reward for being inefficient or greedy? It reminds me of a conversation I had with one grower that was selling 500k+ for a kg (which means most dispensaries would be marking it up to 800 - 1,000 per gram), I asked him how he justified the price and he told me he didn't have to justify it, it's what dispensaries were willing to pay. BTW, I buy most of my personal stuff from a Thai dispensary over a thousand km from me that buys from a large Thai grower. Why? Because he offers great product at a fair price (the average price of all the strains he sells is less than 400 baht a gram) and I've met the guy and like him. That's all I ask for in a seller/buyer relationship. I'm not saying, "Oh, go buy Cali weed". I'm saying nobody deserves your business unless they earn it and earning it means not price gouging your customers because the market allows you to.

No offense but few dispensaries have lab reports on anything in their shop. Second, what makes you think only Cali weed has PGR? Are you assuming Thai growers are completely ignorant of this technique and wouldn’t use it in a heartbeat if they thought they could get away with it? I can appreciate the “buy local” sentiment but this is straight-up propaganda. I would love to see lab reports on some of this outdoor grown Thai weed. How much of that bad is pesticides or laced with heavy metals? Again, I agree that people should make an effort to buy locally, but Thai growers need to earn the business by producing a quality product at a fair price. It doesn’t do anybody any good if Thai products are not lab tested and 2x - 3x the price of illegally imported cannabis. I mean, how crazy is it that Thailand’s minimum wage is something like 300 baht a day and Cali minimum wage is 300 baht per hour and yet people can still produce weed in California, ship it illegally to Thailand, pay off whoever has to be paid off to get it into Thailand, and then sell it to a dispensary and Thai weed is double or triple the price? Until Thailand gets the price down to a similar level, consumers are being taken advantage of. Finding some illegally imported PGR buds and telling everyone to go out and only buy locally grown weed isn’t an answer to that. In fact it’s actually harmful to Thai growers because they can’t operate their businesses without charging 400k or 500k a kg they’ll eventually kill the market for themselves. If you want to support Thai growers, buy the best weed you can for the cheapest you can get it. Thai growers will figure out how to get the price down to that level. I mean, this is just so comical. Do you drink Thai beer to support Thailand brewers? Are you willing to pay 200 baht for a bottle of Chang if Heineken is 80 baht a bottle? I don’t know where people get it in their heads that there’s some farmer with his buffalo growing cannabis and barely putting food on the table. Many of these growers are rich Thais who have land or the cash to invest in setting up a large indoor hydroponic facility. I’ve met several growers around Thailand and I’ve yet to meet one without a university education. Most are upper-middle class to semi-wealthy. Last grower I met with had us sampling their product from their 18,000 baht Storz and Bickle Mighty dry herb vape and drove a BMW. Oh, and their price was 550k per kg.

I certainly won’t be hiring you for any land war planning. ???? Yes, being an island makes a huge difference. You have limited access points. Thailand can be entered by land from Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, and Malaysia. There are several highly successful industries centered around sneaking people and things across those borders. The fact that they were able to secure those points of entry reasonably well, even with a humanitarian crises happening on the other side of one of those borders, is actually an applaudable achievement. And yes, I’ve heard it airplanes. Maybe you didn’t hear that Thailand suspended all air traffic except for specially approved flights. For awhile even Thai citizens could not return to their country. But the UK, seemed to not understand that airplanes come from other places and allowed people to enter their island and keep bringing new Covid cases with them. The UK is one of the only countries in the world that is not restricting arrivals or enforcing health checks at airports, new data shows. https://metro.co.uk/2020/05/07/uk-country-world-not-airport-health-checks-closing-border-12669125/

Charlotte what? Charlotte’s Web is a CBD strain with 1% THC. There’s also Charlotte’s Angel which is another CBD but super low THC strain. I’ve never seen a plain old Charlotte. Then again, a common practice for some dispensaries is to just throw cool sounding names on stuff and hope people don’t notice. But not surprising that it hits like a Sativa since many (maybe most or all) high CBD strains come from Sativa plants.

Where are you? Some buyers would prefer to pick it up rather than have all of that stuff shipped.

When Thailand removed cannabis from the narcotics list (except for extracts with a THC content of 0.2%) it more or less made cannabis possession as legal as somtam. However, we already know what the government is thinking when they eventually pass cannabis laws to put some restrictions on the plant based on the recent bill that was presented to parliament which was rejected for not doing enough to maintain cannabis for medicinal purposes only. Individuals will be allowed to grow a specific number of plants. The numbers in proposals have ranged from 6 to 15 plants (the first draft of the law said 6 and the second draft said 15 - some MPs cited the increase as one of the reasons they voted to send the bill back). But the wrench that is likely to be thrown into the works is that on the individual level, only the land owner can register the grow. Since foreigners cannot own land, they cannot register their grows themselves. However, in reality, the police simply don’t have the resources to figure out if someone is growing a small number or plants for personal use. There are well over a million people already registered to grow for personal use and that number will keep growing (no pun intended) so it’s not like if a cop sees a plant he’s going to bother himself checking who is and isn’t registered. Also, it seems likely that the offense would not be a drug related offense, rather a failure to register type of offense, just like how smoking cannabis in public is a public nuisance offense, not a drug related offense. Bottom Line: If you want to grow for personal use and you have a significant other, have them register the grow. If you don’t have a SO, grow at your own risk or get your landlord to register. As far as growing CBD, there is no such thing as a CBD only strain. All strains with high CBD will also contain some THC since THC and CBD are only two of the many canabanoids found in a cannabis plant. The proposed laws don’t seem to make a distinction between high and low THC strains and primarily focus on the entire cannabis plant. It seems unlikely that the Thai government will distinguish between the two for growing purposes as it would be practically* impossible for local police to test the THC ratios in growing plants. * Yes, it would be possible, the technology exists, but it wouldn’t be practical from a cost and manpower perspective. What would be the point of such a costly investigation to charge someone with a minor infraction? It would be like assigning a team of detectives and forensic investigators to track down someone that was caught on a traffic cam crossing the road illegally.