Transcript of the above video: 

Yeah unfortunately, in lead up to this upcoming election here in Thailand on February the 8^th – we are sitting here right after the middle of January - sitting here on I guess it's January 16th as of the time of this video and we're already starting to see - that's the reason for the thumbnail - the reefer madness, we're already starting to see something we've seen a bit of going the past few years, going back to 2022 when Cannabis was legalized in Thailand, there seems to continue to be a cohort of people going around pearl clutching and talking about how terrible Cannabis is and that it is this terrible threat to public health and things. My immediate response is where are any of you on alcohol? If it's such a threat to Public Health I mean, alcohol does far worse than Cannabis ever did. I mean look at any of the statistics. 

That being said, I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Cannabis activists demand parties clarify stance. By the way, just FYI, if there any Cannabis users out there and you get the munchies for example and you want to come on down and have a good American style diner meal, please feel free to come on down to the Pancake Palace because we are located between Silom and Suriwong here in downtown Bangkok. My better half and I set up the diner going on about 6 months ago. We're trying to get it up and going; we would really appreciate the support out there in the public, and anybody watching this channel, so if you're interested in having some American Diner style food and you don't have to be a user of Cannabis to do that, please feel free to come on by. The link is in the description below. We would love to see you; we'll put some photos of the food up on screen. Again, we've got chilli bowls, we've got buffalo wings, as well as American Diner style breakfast food, not least of which including pancakes. We've also got glass bottled cokes, sloppy joes. We are also adding Mexican food including tacos and we're also adding a breakfast burrito here shortly, and we're going to add some more American Diner style food especially on ‘special’ as time goes on. So I'll keep folks updated on that. Also, please note, January the 20th is going to be Taco Tuesday. We're also going to be reviewing the film The Distinguished Gentleman with Eddie Murphy, so if you're interested come on down to the Pancake Palace, and we will be having that, the evening 6 pm, January 20th is what we're going to be doing there. 

That said, let me get back to the main point of this video. Again, politics is kicking up; we're going into the election. I think Cannabis, the whole issue of it should be decided by Parliament. We need to deal with an actual Bill promulgated by the actual House and vetted and passed through the actual Senate before we actually see it enacted; I think that's the best way to handle this especially in light of the posture of how this became legal in the first place. It was legalized under emergency powers utilized by the Minister of Public Health, then Minister of Public Health, Anutin Charnvirakul. He pulled it off the Narcotics List using emergency powers, so in order to put it back on there, to my mind unless we go back into an Emergency Decree, we need to go through Parliament, that's the way that it looks like to me, and I think that the facts have borne that out over the past 3 years that others agreed. This needs to be dealt with through Parliament. In fact the same parties that are having a problem with Cannabis right now stipulated to that some years back, but they never managed to get anything done and they are trying to sort of bootstrap through regulation what they can't get done through legislative due process and that is just wrong from where I stand. That being said, I'm hoping that this election and then the installation of the new Parliament will result in some good outcomes insofar as we see an actual law promulgated through the Parliament. But that being said, quoting directly: "A network of medical staff, academics, and civil society groups," - which what does that mean? ‘Civil Society groups’ - Quoting further: "has called on political parties to clarify their Cannabis policies and positions during the election season." Well I agree with that because, for example, I want to know if you are against it, so I don't have to vote for you. 

I think that this has been a good initiative brought to Thailand overall. It's an adult initiative. It's not for everybody and nobody has ever disagreed with that. Again, when it originally came down that this was legal, it cannot be sold to those under 20 and that's a good thing, and frankly, those who do sell it to those who are under 20 should be punished accordingly. That said, quoting further: "The call was made during a recent discussion to review the use of Cannabis and its impact on people's health after the plant was removed from the narcotics list in June 2022." Quoting further: "Bundit Sornpaisarn, a staff scientist at The Institute for Mental Health Policy Research, Canada," - so let's start off. This is a Canadian research group, okay? Could they perhaps have a vested interest in Thailand not having a robust Cannabis economy? Perhaps by dint of the fact that they have their own Cannabis economy and Canada has its own interests in keeping Thailand's Cannabis economy down? I'm not saying that is what's happening, but I am saying it's possibly good to think along those lines. That being said, quoting further: "said data collected from the Ministry of Public Health in one tourism province, showed that Cannabis usage has had a significant impact on people's health over the past 3 years." Well the first thing I would ask is what province, okay. Because Pattaya is an entirely different animal from Korat; it's just a totally different demographic of people that's going to be there. Phuket for example is a totally different demographic than mainland Surat Thani, and mainland Surat Thani is going to be very different I imagine than Koh Phangan or Koh Samui for example, so even within a province I would like to see where the sample data came from. That said, they left it unnamed. Quoting further: "The data showed that the number of people suffering from Cannabis poisoning" - what is that even? Cannabis poisoning? Do you mean they got high? They got stoned? they became intoxicated? I mean if you get drunk is that called alcohol poisoning? There is a difference, and by the way did it kill anybody, because alcohol poisoning can kill people. Whatever this thing you're calling Cannabis poisoning, has it killed anyone? is the next question. Quoting further: "had increased 3.5 times compared to the August 2019 - June 2022 period" - yeah, when it wasn't legal. Of course it's going to go up, likely exponentially, as people are using it because it's now legal. What is this supposed to prove? Quoting further: "when it was classified as a narcotic, jumping from 40 to 115 cases per month on average. Mr. Bundit said the number of patients hospitalized as a result of using Cannabis had skyrocketed from zero to 90 in the province within two years of being legalized." Well my question is how many people were hospitalized for alcohol poisoning within that same period? And by the way, 90 over 2 years? So 90 people got so stoned that it had a negative impact on their physiology over two years and again didn't kill anybody. They just got kind of sick. What are we worried about? I'm not understanding what the dire threat to the Thai people is from this. Again, reasonable people can disagree on Cannabis legalization; what it does to people's state of mind; what it does to people's sort of mental capacity over a period of time. Those are valid questions. I get all of that, but again they have attempted time and again to scaremonger on this issue, and every time you look at the core data, you look at it in context, it really begs a lot of questions. That said, quoting further: "When it was classified as a narcotic, jumping from 40 to 115 cases per month on average." Yeah, like 40 to 115; just the fact it went legal would lead to that. And again I ask, how many people had detrimental impacts from alcohol during the same period? Quoting further: "Mr. Bundit said the number of patients hospitalized as a result of using Cannabis had skyrocketed from zero to 90 in the province within two years of being legalized." Again, zero to 90 within two years. How many people are hospitalized for alcohol problems within two years? I would love to know that number. Quoting further: "Of that number, he said 80% were foreigners." Again, so if this is, "oh, it's a scourge on Thais, well okay so 20% of 90 people, so 18 people were hospitalized as a result of using Cannabis in 2 years? And that is supposed to drive us to run for the hills? Again, I bring up reefer madness, and for those who don't know the background, William Randolph Hearst who owned paper mills was basically the financier, the benefactor behind the film Reefer Madness which was just a giant piece of propaganda against Cannabis and basically the result of that was we got Cannabis illegalization and then all kinds of problems from that. That being said, quoting further: "The impact of Cannabis on tourism is that high-spending tourists try to avoid experiencing the unpleasant smell of Cannabis on the street," he said." I thought you were somebody from the Public Health Ministry? Public policy. What does this have to do with that at all? That's just your anecdotal opinion. How do you know high-spending individuals? What? How is that even relevant? What data points is that based on? Did you do a survey of that? Quoting further: "However, there is a huge number of low-spending tourists who are happy with the relatively free and open Cannabis policy in Thailand." Again, where are these conclusions being drawn from, and from what data? I thought the whole point of this was you were talking about the public health ramifications of Cannabis legalization. Not a propaganda push for your own opinion regarding Cannabis, and none of this has to do with public health. High-spending tourists versus low-spending tourists? And by the way, I don't think that even that anecdotal notion is valid at all. I know plenty of so-called high-net-worth individuals, high-spending individuals that partake of Cannabis. So again, what are we talking about here? Quoting further: "Dr. Tappana Sumpatanarax of Vachira Phuket Hospital said that in Phuket's Thalang district, the number of patients hospitalized due to being adversely affected by using the plant as a recreational drug had increased sevenfold" - what are the stats of people that have been using alcohol recreationally with regard to their public health outcomes? How many people have died from it? That's what we really need to look at here at end of the day. I really love Matthew McConaughey's line in the film The Gentleman where he's talking to Lord George who's another whatever, gangster, wise guy, gentleman ne'er do well, whatever, and he's telling him, "hey I'm in the weed game. The thing I like about it is it doesn't kill anybody." And he's talking to a guy who is in to, let's just say, selling harder drugs. That would be my point with all of this, and especially when comparing Cannabis to alcohol. I think the answer is clear. A society is better off with Cannabis being legal than alcohol from an objective standpoint, if you're only looking at death caused. Because we can go through all the statistics in the world of an extra 18 people in the last 2 years being "hospitalised" as a result of using Cannabis, whatever that means, but again did anybody die? Because I'm sure if somebody died directly as a result of Cannabis usage, we would be hearing nothing other than that from this faction that would like to see this thing illegalised. 

Look, I think folks know what my position is on this. I think it should be "recreationally legal”. I find it interesting. I was listening to Jimmy Dore, tip of the hat to Jimmy Dore. He runs his own YouTube channel. I have followed him for years going back into the Covid thing, and he brought up the fact that now even in California you don't need licenses and all of this nonsense to get Cannabis because it always was just nonsense. At the end of the day, I think Thailand would be doing itself a really big favour. Just be mature about this thing. People may not like that other people partake in the usage of Cannabis. That's a matter of taste. At the end of the day, there are not really a lot of compelling public health reasons why this should be illegalized, or as they put it, “put back on the narcotics list.” One, it doesn't fit the definition of a narcotic to begin with. It was always nonsensical both in the US and Thailand that it be on that list in any event. Meanwhile, the notion that to keep it under this medicinal rubric and have everybody have to do all these work arounds and things, it's just nonsense. Meanwhile, alcohol is just getting off scot-free. If we're looking at it from a public health standpoint, then we should be looking at, "hey why aren’t we illegalising alcohol, if it comes down to the issue of Public Health? Because alcohol does kill people; directly kills people. If you consume too much alcohol you can die, just from that alone. Cannabis you would need to smoke or ingest like some huge amount that basically impossible for a human to ingest in order to die from. So to my mind, just purely from an objective observational standpoint, to my mind it's fairly clear, there really isn't any good reason for illegalising Cannabis purely from a public health standpoint. Again recreational use, but it needs to be regulated: no, children shouldn't be anywhere near it, and those who would allow children to partake in this, yeah, they need to be punished. 

That being said, it remains to be seen and with the election coming, I expect there will be further developments, and we will certainly be keeping people updated on this channel as the situation evolves.