The once-illicit drug is now sold at market stalls, beach clubs, and even hotel check-ins. But the laws of this marijuana paradise aren’t clear.
A unique sweet scent permeates the night market at the fishing village on Koh Samui in Thailand, winding its way through stalls of mango sticky rice and barrels of cocktail carts. The Samui Grower marijuana shop is actively working today. There were glass jars on the table, each with a picture of a different flowering green shoot, labeled with something like “Road Dawg” mixed THC25% 850 TBH/gram.
Elsewhere on the island, at the Chi Beach Club, tourists lie on couches sucking twisted colons and munching green hemp-leaf pizza. On Instagram, Green Shop Samui offers a marijuana menu with strangely named buds: Truffle Cream, Banana Kush, and Sour Diesel, as well as cannabis crackers and herbal cannabis soap.
Anyone familiar with Thailand’s heavy-handed approach to recreational drug use can see this and wonder if they smoke too much. A country where drug-related crimes were punishable by death and caught up in a full moon party allowing tourists to check in at Bangkok’s infamous Hilton Hotel now appears to be turned on its head. The Thai government legalized marijuana last month in an apparent attempt to lure tourists into the post-coronavirus downturn. Samui’s streets are already lined with drugstores with names like Mr Cannabis, which tourists say openly sell cannabis at hotel check-in counters. However, the laws regarding marijuana are much darker than it may seem in this “marijuana paradise”.
On June 9, the Thai government removed marijuana and marijuana plants from the list of illegal drugs, allowing Thais to grow and sell marijuana freely. However, the government’s line is to only allow production and consumption for medical purposes, not recreational use, and only allow production and consumption of low-potency marijuana with tetrahydrocannabinol (THC, the main hallucinogenic compound) below 0.2%. Recreational use of marijuana is discouraged as officials warn that under the Public Health Act, anyone caught smoking marijuana in public could be charged with causing a public “malodor” and sentenced to a $25,000 fine. baht (580 pounds sterling) and imprisonment for three months. But on the beaches of Koh Samui, the law is easier to explain.
At Chi, a chic beach club in Bang Rak on Koh Samui that serves Bollinger magnums and fine French wines, owner Carl Lamb not only offers a CBD-infused menu, but openly sells potent marijuana by the gram and pre-rolled. weed.
Lamb, who originally experimented with medicinal marijuana for his own digestive issues, teamed up with Chiang Mai University to grow medicinal marijuana for Chi’s CBD-infused menu of CBD Berry Lemonade, Hempus Maxiumus Shake, and CBD Pad Kra Pow. When the drug became legal, Lamb took it upon himself to start selling “real” joints at his bar.
“At first I put a few grams in the box just for the hype,” he laughs, pulling out a large black humidor filled with various marijuana strains – 500 baht (£12.50) per gram of waiting. Lemonade at BlueBerry Haze costs THB 1,000 (£23) per gram.
Now Chi sells 100 grams a day. “From 10 a.m. until closing time, people are buying it,” Lamb said. “It really opened the eyes of people who wanted to try it.” who buy directly from the plane. According to Lamb, the law only prohibits him from selling to people under 25 or pregnant women, and “if anyone complains about the smell, I have to shut them down.”
“We started getting calls from all over the world asking, ‘Is it really possible and legal to smoke marijuana in Thailand?’ We already know that it attracts more tourists – people book Christmas.”
Lamb said the impact of Covid on the island has been “devastating”. “There is no doubt that the legalization of marijuana has had a huge positive impact. Now you can come here for Christmas, lie on the beach in Asia and smoke weed. Who doesn’t come?”
The Thai men who run the Samui Grower cannabis stall at the market are no less enthusiastic. “It was great for the tourists,” he said when I asked him how the trade was going. “Great. The Thais love it. We make money.” Is that legal? I have asked. “Yes, yes,” he nodded. Can I buy it to smoke on the beach? “Like this.”
In contrast, at the Green Shop on Koh Samui, which opens next week, I was told that they would warn customers not to smoke in public areas. No wonder tourists are confused.
I learned that Morris, a 45-year-old Irish father, was selling marijuana. “I didn’t know it was so legal now,” he said. Does he know the laws? “I knew that they wouldn’t arrest me for this, but I didn’t go into it,” he admitted. “I wouldn’t smoke on the beach if there were other families around, but my wife and I would probably smoke in a hotel.”
Other tourists are more relaxed. Nina told me at her hotel in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand, that marijuana was sold at the front desk. “I’ll still smoke,” she shrugged. “I don’t really pay attention to whether it’s legal or not.”
“Now nobody understands the law. It’s a mess – even the police don’t understand it,” a marijuana seller told me on condition of anonymity. Working discreetly, delivering marijuana to farang tourists by hotel concierges, he said, “For now, I’ll be careful because the law isn’t clear. They [the tourists] don’t know anything about the law. They don’t know that you can’t smoke in public places. Although smoking in public places is very dangerous.”
At Chi’s, Linda, a 75-year-old American woman, openly smokes a joint, calmly accepting the vagaries of the law. “I don’t care about the gray areas in Thailand. Smoke with respect,” she said. She believes that going to a restaurant together in Chi “looks like a boutique, like buying a bottle of good wine for a friend.”
The real question now is what happens next. Can a country that once had some of the strictest drug laws in the world really adopt some of the lenientest drug laws?
Post time: Nov-23-2022