Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing licensing by gradation of Cannabis. What are we talking about here? Well first of all I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Pattaya Mail, that is pattayamail.com, the article is titled: Thailand's anti-Cannabis laws will have a slow start. Quoting directly: "Future ambiguities in enforcement include how the Police will differentiate between medical and pleasure marijuana." Well let's, first of all that is a presumption that has not been codified into law. There seems to be this ongoing presumption or push, and I am not picking on Pattaya Mail here, I have seen this in the Bangkok Post as well and even some other outlets, there seems to be this like push if you will to make Cannabis illegal under certain circumstances. They continue to use like 'recreational' or 'for pleasure' which nobody is sitting around talking about 'recreational grapes' and usage in wine. I really find this kind of a weird way to look at this whole issue. Quoting further: "Presumably, an insomniac enjoys smoking weed which he believes can help him or her sleep better. Thailand has around 6,500 marijuana stores which aren't necessarily illegal as many operate in a sort of gray area with Cannabis currently delisted as a narcotic. Other shortcomings of the current law include a lack of testing requirements, no seed-to-sale program for marijuana and confusion over taxation issues." Well yeah, that is why we need regulation but to illegalize, as have I said this product I think is a bad idea; at this point in many ways I think the horse has left the barn already if you will. 

Further to this, there was a comment on a prior video we did on Cannabis, quoting directly: "I believe that any product containing over 0.2 THC is prohibited as of right now. Correct?" As I would have said in that and I made another video specifically on that I was going to comment "I am not sure" which I'm not. "Can you cite a promulgated regulation enacted pursuant to a relevant Thai Statute to that effect?" And I said that because look it is hard to say that there as any, the way I look at it presently, there is a license for controlled herbs, there are guidelines associated with that licensing and that licensing, it can be rescinded so if you're clearly doing something that the Ministry of Public Health doesn't like, then presumably I guess they could rescind your license. 

Now that said, going back to this notion of gradation and the reason I brought up that comment, was because that commenter brought up the point that okay and this was talked about last year when they were talking about passing the law as well where there was going to be okay 0.2% THC content was going to be a threshold of some kind with regard to licensing, and circling back to that, I think it is possibly a good idea to start looking at Licensing in that way based on the gradations if you will of the potency of the THC within the product itself. I think there is something to be said for look the licenses that currently exist now that allow these shops to be open as they are, could continue into the future and you could just say, "look but you can't sell anything with 0.2% THC or higher in any of these stores." I could definitely see a licensing scheme where they said look medical grade Cannabis, stuff that has a really high level of potency, you are going to need to have special licensing for that or you may not even be able to sell to the public certain types of Cannabis with certain levels of THC, certain high levels of THC. It makes sense to me to have perhaps a licensing scheme that rather than just take a one-size-fits all approach, so-called 'zero-tolerance' - I have always hated that term zero-tolerance because it blankets over real problems in the sense that if you take a zero-tolerance approach, there is always going to be a factual scenario that arises where zero-tolerance is not the correct way to look at it in my opinion. 

Look, the point I am trying to make here is I think licensing on some kind of scale might be the way to go. It might be sort of the compromise that we are all looking for insofar as yeah, the Cannabis industry continues; continues to draw in the tourists it currently draws in, but moving forward under some kind of new legislative scheme, we could see a situation wherein again different heightened levels of THC may warrant higher levels of licensing, more scrutiny, basically more hoops to jump through in terms of the licensure, more compliance necessary in order to maintain licensure for being able to not just sell, but store or basically have anything to do with facilities associated with Cannabis which has THC of a very high quantity. Yeah again heightened licensure for that, heightened scrutiny, I think is a good idea but at the lower level sort of, if you will retail kind of Cannabis, yeah 0.2 or less, maybe that is the threshold to set. I don't know what the answer is but maybe looking at this less as a binary thing of "it's going to be recreationally legal or not" maybe instead of even worrying about what people do with their own time, we instead look at "well what's the potency of the product" and then start making licensing guidelines with regard to that.