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As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing "smoking rooms". What are we talking about with respect to "smoking rooms"? Well I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, that is bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Weed shops to provide smoke spots. Quoting directly and I urge those who are watching this video, a lot of information in that article, a lot of up to date information in that article, check out that article for yourself if you want the full context. I am going to quote a small excerpt. Quoting directly: "Cannabis sellers on Khao San Road will be told they must operate their own smoking places to help keep the local environment free of the pungent smell of marijuana. The newly built Plantopia zone is one such venue that will allow Cannabis sales and smoking for visitors. The Department of Thai Traditional and Complementary Medicine had insisted that licensed Cannabis sellers were allowed to distribute Cannabis buds, but it was against the law to allow Cannabis - smoking or eating - areas in their shops."

Yeah this has kind of been one of these gray areas we are hashing out as we are seeing this regulatory structure kind of come to the foreground. Look, this is just how law and regulation gets made. I saw this happen in the United States. They pass a law or they change a policy, major policy and then they have to start dealing with "okay how do we deal with this? how do we regulate it? how do we make it so we get tax revenues but at the same time we kind of weigh the social benefits and contemporary community standards type thinking, how do we deal with that?" This is what we are working through right now. So the interesting thing to me though is these smoking rooms if you will, might end up being a major boon to the Thai commercial real estate sector which has been heavily hit. Anybody that has been over here thus far, and believe me we are happy to see the tourists, it was great. I was down at Pattaya this past weekend with all the fireworks and everything, people were everywhere. It was great to see the tourists back. I think I speak for everyone in Thailand when I say welcome back, we are all so happy to see you. We are especially frankly happy to see your money and that is great as well but the commercial real estate sector is really hurting in many ways. 

Some of it is from sort of more systemic changes within the overall economy both locally here in Thailand and globally due to things like the internet; the retail sector just isn't what it once was, these kind of things, there's not the demand for retail space that perhaps there once was. These smoking rooms may actually, inadvertently maybe, end up sopping up a little bit of, I am not going to say it's going to be the end all be all, but it may end up ameliorating if you will some of the lack of demand for overall commercial real estate here in Thailand at the moment especially in tourism type sectors and zones and even in places frankly that aren’t particularly tourist oriented. Because again these rules are probably going to end up applying across the board so something to think about, sort of an aspect of this that I sort of saw from my unique perspective I guess you could say, where yeah on the one hand this may look like kind of overly imposing some regulation. First of all I have got no problem with regulation. I have said this before and I will say it again. I think Thailand has got to kind of walk the middle path on this issue. Yes I think it is good that they have legalized this; I think they it is good that they have commoditized this. It is an agricultural commodity at the end of the day, that really is fundamentally what it is. People also fail to see the medicinal, I think it is really interesting the media has sensationalized greatly the recreational side of this. That is a medicinal side of this. I have talked to many older folks. I am doing another video contemporaneously with this one discussing this as well but I have talked to many older folks here in Thailand that have come to Thailand especially to retire, because they like the liberal attitude towards things like the Cannabinoid Oils and things that like that they use for various medicinal purposes. So people, I think the media especially has kind of lost focus on the medicinal side but okay, when you are looking at the sort of tangential whatever you want to call it, recreational side of this, I do get it. There needs to be a middle path. I have said in other videos, I don't particularly want to live in a place where I am walking around smelling that everywhere. I don't really want to be explaining to children or people's family, I don't want families to have to explain to their children what that is and what's going on. It's not something that I think is a great idea. Now if you smell it for a moment and people are trying their best to sort of keep everything in line then I don't think there's any reason to be unduly picky about that issue but I do get the policy argument big time against just having it out in the open and everywhere. I think the notion of smoking rooms is a good idea and I think inadvertently it may end up being a boon to the commercial real estate sector here in the Kingdom of Thailand.