Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Cannabis yet again. I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: More moonshine deaths, investigation widens. Quoting directly: "Two more deaths have taken the toll in Bangkok's moonshine methanol scare to six, as investigators widen their search for those producing and selling the deadly rotgut beyond the city’s Northern suburbs. Dr. Pairoj Surattanawanich, Deputy Director-general of the Department of Medical Services, said on Wednesday that two more drinkers had died from the effects of methanol intoxication on Tuesday."

So for those of you who are unaware, yes there is sort of Moonshine whiskey, moonshine liquor here in Thailand. It's often referred to as "Lao Kao" and you'll sometimes see Street vendors selling this stuff. Look it's high grade. I mean you could probably with some of it, fuel small engines or something from it. But that said, the point of this video is one, note that you never hear a hue and cry about the perils and pitfalls of recreational alcohol. Meanwhile as the title of the video suggests, you never hear about any deaths from moonshine Cannabis.

I bring this up because notwithstanding the current sort of policy debate is kind of muted at the moment regarding Cannabis as we are awaiting later on probably some activity, I would imagine probably next year or late this year, in Parliament with regard to discussion of some sort of promulgated law which we have yet to see and remains to be seen. But to sort of discuss this just on a basic level, it's worth noting, I've heard a lot of people talk about medicinal versus recreational. I think that's a false dialectic. In fact I think it's out there to sort of obfuscate the underlying major issue which is look, we are all adults here. Can we just regulate this thing in much the same way that we regulate alcohol and tobacco for example? Where yeah we all know it has detrimental health effects, but we're adults and consenting adults can make decisions regarding their own health care and what they choose to use recreationally or otherwise.

The other thing I don't like about the notion of exclusively a medicinal regime, is the underlying hypocrisy that you have to say that there's something wrong with you medically in order to gain access to this particular product. Again are these same hurdles in existence for things like tobacco and alcohol? No, and meanwhile as evidenced from this article, alcohol can be far more deadly than Cannabis ever can be, at least in its present form. Now years may go by where processed stuff may become so potent that maybe there could be detrimental health effects similar to alcohol but I think that that is way in the offing, and even beyond that, any future law would probably highly regulate processed Cannabis but again in its sort of natural state, it's pretty much impossible to be killed by the substance itself, unlike alcohol. And meanwhile we don't have the same sort of talking points regarding alcohol here in the Kingdom of Thailand.