Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Cannabis yet again here in Thailand. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Thai Examiner, that is thaiexaminer.com, the article is titled: Chuwit sets out to campaign against Bhumjaithai as Anutin tells Reuters marijuana is a vote winner. A couple of things here. First of all I have parsed out a small excerpt to this so that I can do my analysis for this video. A lot going on in that article. I really urge folks who are watching this video, go check out that article on thaiexaminer.com. As usual, they do an exhaustive rundown of everything that is going on with respect to this. For those who are unaware, I have done videos in the past. I think people are already aware of sort of my inherent bias, not going to go into that any further and I am not going to go into political issues, that is not really the purpose of this channel. We are here to sort of talk about just the legal issues as they arise in the news I guess.

Quoting directly, and I am paraphrasing a little bit so, Cannabis "has now found itself cleared for recreational use in Thailand with its availability through over 14,000 marijuana retail outlets across the country." That number was staggering to me. I felt like I was hit over the head the same way I was hit over the head six weeks after this was pulled off the narcotics list and they noted that 28 billion Baht in market cap just appeared out of nowhere which by the way gets going to Thailand's GDP too by the way which is a totally good thing. Meanwhile, like the number of 14,000 retail outlets is just staggering. Anybody who looks at this through the lens of job creation and the lens of the creation of SMEs as well as just economic activity generally, has to at least look at that number with some degree of reverence. I very much believe reasonable people can disagree on the issue of Cannabis in Thailand, I don't think there is any doubt about that. I suspect it probably will be one of the major issues in the upcoming election and people have the right to go vote on that issue as they see fit. That said, with regard to the analysis of this just purely in a business context, that is absolutely staggering. Meanwhile from the legal perspective, it is going to be very interesting in the aftermath of the forthcoming election. Let's just go ahead and presume that at some point we are going to then see a Bill which will create a regulatory structure promulgated in the aftermath of this thing and that under that Bill we are going to see a legal framework for dealing with this issue. Man 14,000 pre-existing operations then coming under a new legal regime that is going to be interesting, it's going to be very interesting to watch. I suspect you are going to see a lot of content on this channel talking about all the legal ins and outs that are arising, probably in real time associated with running a Cannabis operation here in Thailand. 

Now the thing to take away from this video especially foreigners be very, very careful in this space. In fact I urge any foreign nationals in this space right now, I almost am at the point of saying "get out" not out of any kind of xenophobia or something of this nature but because this isn't legally particularly designed to be overly accommodating to foreign nationals. Everything we have seen on this, I have done the videos going way back into 2017 I think is when we first started talking about this with any degree of frequency. There were Khao Sod English articles about it, I remember quoting at the time. Long story short I am not saying this isn't a space where foreign investment cannot come in but it is definitely a space where foreign nationals should be very careful because we have yet to see a regulatory structure on this and I definitely can see a lot of scenarios arising where that regulatory structure comes in very much to the detriment of folks of foreign nationalities who have invested heavily in this sector. That's not me saying the sky is falling or anything of that nature, but long story short, there still isn't a real Bill on this out there regarding how exactly this is going to be regulated. Until there is, there is just going to be a lot of uncertainty associated with what the future of this sector looks like here in the Kingdom of Thailand.