Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are asking the question, "Is Thailand trying to ban smoking Cannabis for pleasure?" 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: "Although Thai Authorities are determined to outlaw Cannabis for pleasure once and for all," so let's start there. I don't think that that is a correct assessment; that is not how I look at it. As we discussed in a prior video regarding Cannabis, the present legislation or proposed legislation is still under consideration. The Cabinet has yet to adopt it. It looks to me like it is currently sort of tabled as they continue to discuss it so I don't think it is fair to say that there is a foregone conclusion that they are looking to outlaw so-called recreational use Cannabis per se. Now how exactly that factors into medicinal and where you sort of draw the lines between the two, I don't know that yet and I don't think anybody does because we have yet to see any promulgated legislation. But I don't think it is fair to say that Thai Authorities “are determined”. I think there are some who may be but there are others who are taking a different approach to this. So again this remains under consideration and quite honestly it should. This is how these things should happen, this is sort of the due process of legislation.

I found it very weird in the media that the narrative seems to be towards doing something fast and this needs to change, the law needs to happen and then also reporting on things as if they were a foregone conclusion when in fact they are not. Quoting further: "Experts say there is likely to be a long grace or settling in period." Yeah I would agree with that statement. Yeah there is going to be a period of time where we sort of assess, where Thailand if you will assess, how it is going to deal with Cannabis, how it's going to regulate it, how it's going to tax it, I expect is going to be a major issue. But again I don't think it is a foregone conclusion in terms of anything with regard to this legislation yet, we are still kind of going through the process here. Quoting further: "Jessataporn Bunnag, a specialist lawyer, said "A great deal of money was invested prior to decriminalization of the herb in 2022." Again, I don't view this as decriminalization. As we have discussed I see why people use that terminology because they view it as "oh well it was pulled off the narcotics list and then nothing else happened". Well in the way that is Civil Law System works it is my understanding under the Doctrine of Codification that effectively legalizes it, it is legal at that point. Quoting further: "of the herb in 2022 and it's going to take time for a new legislative process to evolve." Now I couldn't agree with that more. That's very well put; that's exactly what's happening. The legislation is evolving and everybody has got to chime in on this because we have got to come up with something workable in my opinion and I think Thailand absolutely can do that. As I am making a video contemporaneously with this one, I think that there is one way of doing that is ‘gradations’ if you will of different types of this product and different licensing structures associated therewith. I will get into that as I said in another video I am making contemporaneously with this one but again going back to the original point, again I don't think it is a foregone conclusion that anybody in Thailand is saying that this will be outlawed for pleasure or recreation, we just don't quite know yet. Quoting further: "Commentator Chokwan Kitty Chopakasai predicted that some shops which had abused the system in the last 18 months - for example opening selling joints, edibles and extracts - would close." Well who said that? Why is that a foregone conclusion? Again we don't know. The legislation isn't promulgated. And again the media seems to try to find folks who, and this seems to be across the board, I am not picking on the Pattaya Mail, Bangkok Post seems to be, I don't know, for lack of a better term, 'negative' on cannabis and I don't know why there is this push to look at this from a negative angle rather than just viewing it objectively for what it is. We have a newly legalized if you will sort of cash crop or agricultural product that is out there on the market and we are trying to figure out the best way to deal with legislation and regulation of it but it seems like in the media that it is constantly being slanted towards 'oh it just has to be criminalized and we have to have all these criminal laws out there to put people back in jail for dealing with it', which again that is like two steps backward. The whole reason for the legalization was so people didn't go to jail for this because it really is something rather minor. As I have discussed in other videos, it doesn't kill anyone, that's a big one to me. I just keep coming back to that. Yeah and I get it, there are exceptional circumstances but compared to alcohol, Cannabis has killed far less people than alcohol and nobody sits around talking about criminalization of recreational alcohol. Now that might be because prohibition was an absolute failure in the United States and we have seen that but we can extrapolate the same lessons from the failure of prohibition that we can to this Cannabis issue is trying to regulate what consenting adults do in their own time, in their own privacy, I just don't think it's something that can be done and every time you try to do it, quite honestly negative by-products come about as a result of it. 

Now certain things, for example hard drugs which for whatever reason, at the same time that they want to illegalize Cannabis, they are talking about allowing possession of 5 pills of methamphetamine to be effectively decriminalized, which I don't understand how you can say "oh methamphetamine, that's no big deal, but we have got to do something about this Cannabis issue", when to my mind again clearly the cost-benefit on Cannabis is a wildly different thing than cost-benefit analysis with methamphetamine. Again even consenting adults, I understand regulating narcotics because at the end of the day they can kill people, so that makes some sense to me. Even though I have been accused of being an arch-libertarian and all this stuff, whatever, I don't really like to put any labels on people if I can avoid it, least of all myself, but again I think it is a hard argument to make when it doesn't kill anybody at the end of the day, that heavy regulation is needed or that prison time is a necessity associated with that kind of product, again that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. That said, quoting further: "but that most would still be able to operate provided they obtained new licenses and kept detailed records." Well yeah, that is called regulation. You get a license  By the way I was talking to somebody the other day who was saying, it was a foreigner in this case that was saying: "oh I'm sure all these shops around here are unlicensed" and I said: "Why do you think that?" because I have walked into a number of stores since all this came about just poking around looking to see what I can see and gain a grasp on how the market is operating, whatever, all of them I have walked into had licenses. Then the next thing I asked the foreigner that told me this is I said: "Would you even know what one looked like, what a license looked like if you saw it?" And he had admit like kind of sheepishly, "I guess not" and I said "well, then why are you saying that?" It has been very interesting watching people make these kind of broad statements about Cannabis and how it should work and again it is all framed in this sort of foregone conclusion tone that "oh well  we are just going to illegalize that." Well who said? That's the point of having a Parliament is to discuss this stuff before we make these laws and I am glad to see that the current lawmakers are taking their time and considering this issue rather than just sort of charging ahead and possibly putting the country in a place worse off than we found it before this all happened.