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Pot industry pushes back against draft law that would put an end to Thailand’s cannabis revolution


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8 hours ago, Moonfire said:

Well, don't cherry-pick.....and be a hypocrite.... all of nothing LOL 

 

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If stupid Whataboutism is your answer, who cares.........:post-4641-1156694572:

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6 minutes ago, Bday Prang said:

Nice one,    I think many will also quietly continue here as they have done for centuries,  My brother in law , a police inspector, confirmed a long time ago that he considered   "Lao" to be the best 

The people who traditionally have valued and developed the world famous so-called Thai stick, Mango Thai and Lao Gold as they are known today and among many other lines are the Phu Tai and ethnic Lao of Isaan and they hail from both countries, however Thailand has had more exposure to other regions and farmers have mixed the more inbred and unique lines they still keep in remote parts of Laos with probably indicas for better yields and faster flowering at the expense of quality of the effects. Still incredible weed has been grown here for centuries and still does, just not avaiolable in your average shop in Thailand. But You can still grow your own of those varieties. There's a pot landrace preservation society called Zomia that also sells other lines that Angus doesn't carry and they also have excellent photos of various southeast Asian drug varieties that are still grown and seeds of which they sell from Thailand, Cambodia, and India. They are based in Bangkok as well, but looks like they will have to close up and it will all disappear again and you'll have to go into the hills of Nakorn Si Thammarat yourself and get your own seeds of Grandma's Tanaosri Red Star or Meun Sri!

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3 hours ago, Jonathan Swift said:

There have been hundreds of studies, which you could easily have found were it not for laziness on your part. Most of your questions could have been addressed online with a little research. Too much actual work though, right? 

Hundreds of studies in Thailand?

So, what went wrong if all was studied in detail in advance?

If you know about any studies which the government evaluated before they implemented the legalization, then please share them.

I read the news every day and I don't remember ever seeing anything like that. 

 

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Has there been a notable increase in tourism since weed was removed from the narcotics list ?

I do sympathise with the shop owners and farmers who might go out of business but why start up a business when it wasn’t in black and white what the laws were going to be ?

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9 minutes ago, Jumbo1968 said:

Has there been a notable increase in tourism since weed was removed from the narcotics list ?

I do sympathise with the shop owners and farmers who might go out of business but why start up a business when it wasn’t in black and white what the laws were going to be ?


Are you asking yourself such a stupid question?

What do you think everyone should have done? Waited a few years for the dust to settle?

Meanwhile those who bought Apple and Bitcoin at the beginning are smiling at you. Of course they should all have waited until they were sure the whole Apple and Bitcoin thing was guaranteed to be a success.  

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4 hours ago, Gilligan In Drag said:

There's also a pretty important consideration that gets ignored and thrown under the bus:

 

The dangers of prohibition.

 

Recreational drug use can  harm some, but so do governments that propagandize their people and render them 

that much more confused and ignorant in that process, or so can driving a car harm people. Supernovas explode with the power to annihilate whole local

star clusters, but also provide the material to form new worlds. Get used to it, Shiva. the god of destruction  is not worshipped

by 100's of millions of people in India for no reason, its a profound and prevasive aspect of life that the polite genteel gardners

of the western world think they can get under control by spraying their gardens with pesticides. When governments embark on drug wars and prohibitions you are effectively spraying your people with pesticides adding something equally as dangerous as rampant drug abuse if not more so

to the whole mix. Its not like no one knew that even 100 years ago either and its often what you read as to why they stopped alcohol prohibition in the west: its doesn't work and and creates more problems than it solves.

 

Prohibition is already a long discredited way to control the harmful effects of mass recreational drug use on society if it ever

is sincerely carried out to protect society, and personally I don't think it is done for that purpose.

 

It is clearly useful as a political tool, social control, and for the profit of entities like colonial and neo-colonial entites and drug companies,

branches of government and criminal elites. It is NEVER done to protect you, lets not be naive, there are no governments

that exist or who have ever existed that were sincerely that interested in their citizen's welfare. It isn't their job, its your job

if you want to live your life fully as a sentient sensible adult human being and if you think the government is able to protect you

from reality even if it wanted to, realities like there are many chemical compounds and plants that change people's behavior in ways that may be dangerous,

then you have been duped into helping them very actively not help you.

 

As we well know from the Iran-Contra scandal in the United States in the 1980's, an illegal drug market

is a great way for rogue actors in government and military to get funding they need to run wars and other projects

without approval, public knowledge and oversight. So in our weak efforts, efforts that seem these days to have completely failed, to have representative

and transparent government that genuinely serves their people throughout the world, drug prohibitions add even more problems to the human problems with running sovereign nations that treat its citizenry with due respect and are corrosive towards those ends of an accountable

government which acts with purpose that is clear to all making for a life that without intervention and stupid nannying

is actually genuinely safer and better for everyone.

 

People wax all snarky-barky on the forum whenever the cannabis legalization in Thailand topic comes up, "Oh, they just wanna

make a bunch of money!" The same can be said for illegalization, just that who makes the money will be different.

If its illegal then who makes the money changes hands those in government and business who are positioned to profit from illegal sales will benefit.

 

making weed illegal is not to save the children and adults of Thailand, if they were interested in that, other more key things would be prioritized

such as banning toxic chemicals, chemicals banned all over the world no less,

but used ubiquitously in food, agriculture. Or working to effectively ensure people have clean air and water.

Or how about protecting people from predatory doctors and pharmacies with malpractice laws.

Or how about instilling in people good basic health and safety awareness, or tryin gto create a system

that does not run on corruption so that laws protecting people from harmful pollutants, food and medication

will be enforced and Thailand can honestly test foods and drugs for harm creating capabilities. Theres plenty

of dangerous chemical compounds galore everytime you step into a shop or market or supermarket. Really, cannabis

and alcohol are scapegoats, even though of course one must be judicious in their use. But that goes without saying

for anything.

 

The health of Thai people is very poor, among the worst in Asia. Anywhere you go in Thailand you are exposed to life shortening levels

of agricultural poisons, a witches brew of compounds in the air from burning refuse and exposed in the cities to clouds of

auto-motive exhausts from easily solvable traffic problems. But there is no will to solve these problems because Thailand like many

countries is hopelessly corrupt and because of that the mentality is theres no immediate gain or opportunity to be gained from

solving those problems. Apparently there is somethingto be had from this cannabis legalization re-criminalization game or it would ne all shrugged off.

 

In addition to providing bad actors with illegal markets and their attendant inflated prices,

With drug prohibitions in place, drugs can be used as a way for government and law enforcement to

falsely imprison, fine and smear who ever they like.

We all know in urban areas everywhere that the police can and do plant drugs

on people who have broken no laws whenever they want to target someone to be taken down or merely fined.

Someone's occasional use of a recreational substance can be a way of completely removing

them from their well earned and capable positions. So, OK go ahead, re-criminalize cannabis

and hand law enforcement another tool to abuse their positions for their own gain and society's loss.

 

And then there's workplace and law enforcement drug testing that prohibition gives you.

And apart from the obviosu it has the unfortunate effect of having normalized the situation whereby

people forefeit their right human right to privacy and bodily autonomy and now your boss or the government or the police can

then have some not insignificant control over your neurochemistry, its not just the big bad

government or law enforcement standing between you and your brain, its your buddy you work with and say good morning to everyday.

Prohibition via drug testing then sets up these subtly corrosive and insidious relationships

like a cancer within the society. People like to recall the old communist regimes where

social empowerment and cohesion was shattered, even down down to the family level

by snitch networks. To me it seems the drug test is another species of this found in the post communist

uni-polar world soon to become multi again.

 

The drug test is also a routine way that law enforcement can arbitrarily extract fines whenever they like and detain who they like.

We are conditioned by the high-techness and scientific glamor of it to carry on in the media and to each other and ourselves

as though testing were actually a legitimate means to control the problem of drug use. Its a gizmo, wow! It must be the answer

to the problem of determining whose on drugs and who isn't. It clearly is not, its very well known drug tests

do not have high enough levels of accuracy and people who do not use drugs can be subject to life ruining

consequences should a law enforcement operative run a money saving or god forbid counterfeit and completely

arbitrary drug test and get a false result.

 

But we now mostly accept drug testing and naively think, and you deny the flakiness of drug tests and assure yorurself well I don't use drugs I have nothing to fear and this will help create a safe world and put the druggies in jail and rehab where they belong and all will be well. Just because you have a piece of technology doesn't mean you have anything legit. It could be anything and you don;t know

how that test actually comes by its results, its all completely opaque to the average person and the agencies and the compaines that make these

tests can hide behind that. They don't even have to make legitmate tests, in most countries such as the United States that even have

supposed consumer standards checks, the outfits are wholly corrupted. Why bother with selling a real test. Just pay some

person with a science degree 2 thousand dollars and presto you have a test that without fail and in 15 minutes tells you whether someone has taken an

illegal drug. Or consider how far you are going to get in Thailand investigating and challenging  whether even a fake test was conducted, all the police have to do

is say, "This is a drug test...and the drug test says you took an illegal drug...you'll have to give up your green papaya shaver manufacturing enterprise to us

because you'll be in for quite awhile." Just ask Americans about that kin dof thing, how now the government routinely seizes all of your assets

and has railroaded many innocent people, ruined them and never returned what was wrongfully seized from them because of a drug charge. there som ehorrific ironies afloat such as in one case traces of cocaine were found on crisp bank notes foun din a safe of one successful balck american business man and his defense attornies presented studies that found that because there is so much illegal drug running done by unmonitored military and government organizations in the United States, there is enough cocaine on every US dollar to incriminate and seize the assets of anyone they choose. So yeah, great, run a drug war and prohibition Thailand.

 

The story of this man who was run in and had yachts and homes and his business empire and assets seized because of a drug test is to be found in the  highly recommended two volume memoirs, Volume 1-Phikal and Volume 2-Tikal of the discoverer of the benefits of MDMA,

and inventor of hundreds of psychoactive compunds the experimental neuro-pharmacologist Alexander Shulgin. Shulgin himself was an eminently thoughtful and articulate and humane advocate for human freedom and potential. He experimented on himself and his friends and chronicalled in voluninous detailed the findings of the beneficial effects of compounds he created at his home laboratory funded by royalties he'd gained earlier in his career working for Dole Pineapple and his salary as a professor and public speaker at UC Berkeley in California. His interest was in psychoactive compounds long before they were in the public eye and concern, and so he got out of working as a chemist in big agriculture as soon as he could. But despite being among the very few given license to investigate and create psychoactive chemicals  by the US government, the DEA decided eventually to go in and tear his lab apart and end his activities by prosecuting him to destroy his work and even ban his book which detailed to the public the effects and methods to synthesize just about anything he found or made himself. The power of a mandate of a drug prohibition gave the DEA, the agency charged with fighting the drug war against the whole world  the overeach to go in and bust up the research. The library of Alexander (Shulgin) has been burned to the ground and decades have now passed in which the befits and nature of the human mind may forever remain obscured.

 

And then there is the way that  drug testing  has opened pandora's box to use flakey technologies  to be able to

predict or even read a person's mind for pre-crime and of course as we know there is much discussion

by governments and law enforcement authorities about how

a pre-crime or a test result saying you were about to commit a crime will be tantamount in the future to

having actually done the crime. To me it would seem that drug testing is a similar operation. Your crime of

having been inebriated and thus a danger to yourself and others is not otherwise apparent. So you have to

take the drug test which in effect says, you are a danger before the fact, its a type of pre-crime indicator in many cases.

 

And also, not to mention, that drug testing, like background checks and monitoring employee

internet activities is used as a shabby substitute for   critical thinking and

evaluative skills, and distracts probably all

companies to some degree from spending time and resources and getting actually competent management

who are foscused on actually able to evaluate employee work and performance and actual behavior on the job.

The society that is on drugs and "on" prohibition, as prohibition is just as capable of creating a deluded nation as a drugs are 

hallucinates as it runs the drug test, the surreptitious background check, the application gathered  look at

an employee's comments and other activities  on internet.

The normalization of superfluous and glamorous high tech tools with limited benefit especially in places

like Thailand where critical and evaluative skills are under developed no doubt lowers the quality of life for everyone.

Indeed ruling institutions and individuals do not want people to have the ability to evaluate performance and behavior

lest their managerial class begin to turn those well honed workplace skills against them. So, you give them the drug that is

drug tests and multi-choice personality investigation quizzes and monitor their twitter posts in lieu. its also no doubt a lot more fun

and inspiring for managers to get to play god and say lets see if Nigel was smoking dope on the weekend and ask him to submit a drug test

rather than going through the monotony of actually looking at what he is doing and having to weigh many considerations

as to whether he's helping the company or organization or govt branch that pays him. You can just save all that headache and hours of boredom

by doing a simple and fun drug test with lots of cool bells and whistles and colors and charts and then be able to proclaim with complete conviction,  "Ah ha! He uses drugs! And he talks a load of crap that i don't appreciate on facebook! I knew he was on drugs! He's out of here! I don't care that he is the star developer!"

 

How much does it matter if your star developer tests positive for cocaine and marijuana, especially if you never ran

a test you'd never have known. Just the act of running a test for drugs is an admission that there is no obvious problem

with your employee's performance in the first place.

 

So thanks to drug prohibition its now acceptable for management to go through the

motions of monitoring the effectiveness of their employees, its essentially a ritual substituting for

real discernment: is the employee an asset in his actual behavior and real contributions. I have never

worked under any Thai manager, and I have worked under many, who could evaluate the quality of anyone's

work or understand the value or liability to the work environment of employees in their charge. They look at

anything but, they understand almost everything but is this work he's doing good or not.
 

Yet the discussion here on the threads and in media and by the government ignores the dire price to be

paid by society as a whole for a drug war or prohibition. They seem blithely unaware despite the precedent

despite the semi-detente in the west regarding recreational cannabis.

 

The end of alcohol prohibition in the United States left us with that conclusion, that was nearly a century ago

yet as soon as alcohol prohibition ended JD Anslinger picked up the reigns and fired the fuel of hysteria against cannabis.

But as that all begin sto end Thailand not only makes a false move to undo it but it decides to say no actually screw all that.

It really seems to doubly affirm their commitment to harming their population to using prohibition for political gain and enriching themselves

and their overlords.

 

 

 

Jeez. ChatGBT has been busy!!

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I can appreciate the opinions on both sides. Shopowners were kind of hoodwinked into jumping into the business, despite the admonitions against 'recreational use'. Of course the explosion of shops never made sense to me...I assume the owners got high rather than doing a proper business plan.

 

I can also see the new government's position that it's kind of an embarrassing view, as the shops are anything but subtle. Many sprung up in a major tourists and entertainment area (Soi 4 to Asoke)....I counted 25 shops in that stretch or just off Sukhumvit, and most champion the whole "pothead" motif. Turbocharged Cheech and Chong might not be the image Thailand wants. (It may not want the agogo image either, but at least in Bangkok those venues are fairly restricted to certain parts of town, while weed shops are everywhere.)

 

From a business perspective, I cannot imagine many---maybe any---of the shops are turning a profit. They are mostly in prime (aka expensive) locations, and a lot of money was spent renovating former Family Marts/Lawson 108s/etc. to try to differentiate themselves from the weed shop next door....and next door...and next door...and across the street. I don't know the margin on the product itself, but I do have a pretty good idea of the costs for rent, electricity, staff, etc., so unless weed margins are massive---which is highly unlikely given the saturation of the market---I really doubt many owners are happy they jumped in.

 

Personally---something that matters little to anyone else---I'm not fond of altered states of consciousness, no matter its source. I do enjoy a cold beer or a glass or two of wine with dinner, but that's because of the taste, not the effect. If I begin to feel the slightest buzz, I switch to water. Booze can be just for flavor, though I accept many or most people chase a buzz. With weed, the sole recreational point is a buzz. Others can make that choice; I choose not to have a buzz, as I find life interesting and exciting enough without it.

 

I also find both drunks and potheads to be unbelievably boring. Most think every erratic or stray thought entering their noggins, while under the influence, is as profound as a cosmic revelation, when in fact it's banal if not downright stupid. Among their fellow drunks and potheads maybe it's "Wow!", but for those whose state is not altered, it's just irritating and dull. If weed has a leg up on booze, it's that a pothead is less likely to go looking for a fight.

 

As for the benefits another poster listed earlier (e.g., blood pressure, inflammation, anxiety, cancer), one can get the same benefits from, of all things, an industrial dye: methylene blue, albeit with zero negative side effects and no altered consciousness.

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11 hours ago, Moonfire said:

Well, don't cherry-pick.....and be a hypocrite.... all of nothing LOL 

 

Required Warnings for Cigarette Packages and Advertisements 

WARNING: Smoking causes head and neck cancer.
WARNING: Tobacco smoke causes fatal lung disease in nonsmokers.
WARNING: Smoking causes cataracts, which can lead to blindness.

 

WARNING: Smoking reduces blood flow, which can cause erectile dysfunction.
WARNING: Tobacco smoke can harm your children.
WARNING: Smoking causes bladder cancer, which can lead to bloody urine.

 

WARNING: Smoking reduces blood flow to the limbs, which can require amputation.
WARNING: Smoking causes COPD, a lung disease that can be fatal.
WARNING: Smoking causes type 2 diabetes, which raises blood sugar.

 

WARNING: Smoking during pregnancy stunts fetal growth.
WARNING: Smoking can cause heart disease and strokes by clogging arteries.
 

 

Maybe some strange injection that is an experiment may kill a few million as well and already has? But believe the science of safe and effective? Bahahahaha Next booster please. 

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2 hours ago, Cabradelmar said:

so many scared old men fearing ganja is the end of humanity... LOL... yet if you are not smoking weed, you are probably a tobacco smoking, out of shape, booze hound with a poor diet and far too many subscription medications #classic 

Maybe I'm not old, but I don't think weed is the end of the world (though I have zero interest in using it), I don't smoke tobacco, I'm in top shape, I'm no booze hound, my diet is great, and I've never had a prescription.

 

Best not to generalize.

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