Thailand legalised medical cannabis in 2018 and four years later, in 2022, recreational cannabis. It was an astounding change, given that countries in and around Asia have traditionally taken a hard line on drugs.
Half of the country’s 500 prisoners on death row in 2018 were there for serious drug offences, according to Amnesty International.
But three short years later, Thailand’s move is regarded as a failure and lawmakers are desperately trying to put the green genie back in the bottle. The backtrack is as spectacular as the initial change.
Once again, you’ll need a doctor’s prescription to buy cannabis, meaning its use will be restricted to medical and health purposes only. Why?
Because Thailand never took the time to develop a decent legal framework. Countless street cafes opened, hundreds of cannabis farms set up, foreign money and overseas growers entered the market. Cannabis tourism became prevalent, replacing other forms of tourism with those who flew in for the ganja. In tourist hotspots, marijuana was sold every few metres, anytime and at prices that dropped dramatically due to the oversupply. Young people got hooked, resulting in addiction issues.
Farmers who followed the loose rules and pumped huge money into their cannabis growing operations have been left high and dry, with warehouses of unsold dried cannabis sitting there. It’s a further disaster waiting to be sold on the black market.
It’s a lesson that we should heed in New Zealand. We got close to heading down a similar path to Thailand when former Labour leader Jacinda Ardern and Justice Minister Andrew Little agreed to the Greens’ demand for a referendum on decriminalising cannabis.
The 2020 vote was defeated by the tiniest of margins: the 50.7% against saw off the 48.4% who wanted cannabis decriminalised. We settled for a medicinal cannabis market, which is now seen as widely successful and offering credible alternative products.
But medicinal cannabis under prescription is very different to a recreational market that, as experienced by Thailand, can lead to the open slather sale of marijuana. I like to think we might have been more careful and considered than they were in Thailand, but recent history shows us otherwise.
Look at our hopeless experience with synthetic cannabis. It was sold it in dairies next to milk and bread. It didn’t take much for a student to look old enough to buy it and no one needed a license to sell it, so all dairies did so. It led to deaths and was labelled a public health crisis.
Then we did it again with vaping. It should have always been a prescription-only service through medical professionals, perhaps offered free as an option for those giving up smoking.
Why on Earth did we allow the widespread retail sale of something that in time might be considered the new smoking? It’s not 95% safe as initially claimed in some advertisements and has had a dire effect on young people, with those who had never smoked – or were unlikely to – taking up vaping.
Ask any school principal, even those at primary and intermediate schools, and they’re likely to have a story about having to deal with vaping. It was allowed to blossom because no one moved quickly enough to limit its sale. Vapes were sold in dairies around the country. Then we allowed specialist shops to set up, with more than 1200 established during the Covid period.
Those two examples show we can’t get it right. I believe loosening laws for the recreational sale and use of cannabis in this country would have been an unmitigated disaster. I can imagine shops would be everywhere by now, alongside the hordes of vape stores.
Imagine your local community shops. There’d be a dairy, a vape store, a weed shop, a takeaway store, a cell phone repairer, a pub with pokies in it and a petrol station, perhaps. There’d be no post shop, no bank, no library and no fruit and veg shop. It’s pretty much like that now minus the weed shop, isn’t it?
And given the widely reported fragile mental health of our teenagers, the last thing they need is a joint to settle them down. It’s a gateway to harder drugs and an even greater fall.
Those who want more liberal laws around the sale and use of cannabis say it brings it out from the shadows and licences the growers and sellers while quality and price are regulated. Sure, that’s the best-case scenario, but it never happened in Thailand despite similar reassurances.
Now, Thailand can’t reverse this quickly enough. Thank heavens our cannabis referendum failed.
