Transcript of the above video:

So first of all I would like to say yeah, we are doing this is an ALERT and while we usually do ALERTS for the Expat Community primarily here in Thailand, this is one of the few instances where I am kind of making this ALERT, in fact I am making this ALERT for folks in Thailand, for Thailand itself, those that care to listen to me. I sometimes feel like I'm screaming into the abyss sometimes but that can also be an interesting endeavour. 

In any event, what is the purpose of this video? Well, the purpose of this video, I made another video recently where I talked about the notion of 'arbitrary and capricious' lawmaking, law enforcement and policy making and how that term of art if you will, that term 'arbitrary and capricious' is oftentimes utilized in a Common Law vernacular as justification to set aside a law, to basically say: "look this law and the way it is being applied are anathema to the Common Law legal system, the notions of liberty enshrined in the Common Law Legal System." And I did some comparative points with this in discussing the Cannabis issue and I'm not going to do too deep a dive into Cannabis specifically as I have done a lot of videos on that topic here recently and I don't think I need to go into any further detail in this video other than to bring up the point that, likely this week we are going to see the Office of the Narcotics Control Board meeting, meet. We have discussed this before. It looks like the Interior Minister, Khun Anutin Charnvirakul sits as the ex-officio Chair of that meeting and hopefully we are going to see, well not hopefully but it's looking like if you will, we are going to see some kind of discussion within that Committee, within that body occurring this week. Whether or not we get some sort of Proclamation Decree; I call it sort of a Ministerial Regulation although I fail to see where they have the authority to make this sort of Ministerial Regulation, I thought they needed to make a Law, that's what they were trying to do through Parliament. They were unable to do that or let's say certain factions, were unable to affect the outcome that they wanted via that channel, so now they are trying to effectively re-criminalize Cannabis just through sort of an almost kind of bureaucratic Fiat for lack of a better term. That may or may not occur this week but I think it is noteworthy.

In that video, we ended up using a thumbnail that had Cannabis in it and again another part of this video, I should point out I have been in transit; frankly the last couple weeks has been very harrowing; I had to deal with some family matters back in the United States, then on top of that it just so happened I was there over the 4th of July, then there was a hurricane in Houston and I had to use Houston for a lot of travelling - it's sort of operated as sort of a hub for me - I am aware to clients, to would-be clients, folks that have been in touch with the firm in the last roughly 10 to 14 days, we have not been responding as we normally do. That's because I do oftentimes have to chime in to our information desk with respect to responses that we send out to our clients. That has not been as timely; we are sorting that out right now. I am making these videos very briefly and then we are getting down to the nitty gritty of dealing with getting everybody sorted out, so please again bear with me, but in the next roughly 48 hours we should have everything sort of back on track as usual. 

Back to the point of this video though, I was talking about this 'arbitrary and capricious' stuff with regard to Cannabis and I meant to make that video and I didn't get my intentions clearly conveyed to our staff back here in Bangkok that was helping me get those videos up while I was unable to do any kind of videos; I was able to record stuff and send things but that was about it. I was able to record my voice as can be seen from those videos. That said, I didn't necessarily want that video to be about Cannabis specifically although we put a thumbnail that was specific to Cannabis, hence the reason I am making this video. 

This goes deeper than the issue of Cannabis. At the end of the day, if there is this big of a reversal after years of detrimental reliance from the business community on a prior change in policy, I think that foreign and possible would-be foreign direct investors to Thailand are looking at this keenly and I have noted that in prior videos when I have been citing source material from the internet but I think it is worth reiterating this once again here as sort of an ALERT this Monday morning, that yeah, again foreign direct investors, a massive reversal like this is something that even in the context, this transcends the issue of Cannabis is what I'm trying to say. Foreign direct investors are going to look at this and they are going to base how they make decisions in the future based on how this plays out. What I am hoping is we see further discussion rather than just a complete reversal of many of the policies that have already been set in motion. Again I also fail to see where the legal basis is to just change this. Again in the past we discussed this. Cannabis was delisted as a narcotic utilizing what in my mind were Emergency Powers pursuant to the Communicable Diseases Act which empowered the Minister of Public Health, then Anutin Charnvirakul, who went ahead and took it off the list. The emergency decree is not in effect now so I don't understand how they're able to do this by Ministerial Regulation and abrogate basic notions of the Doctrine of Codification which exists in the Civil Law System. I am not fully understanding how that's being done and again I am not sure if this is legally correct. Again I am a layman as far as Thai Law goes, but we are seeing certain political actors out there saying that they will likely file law suits as a result of a major reversal. So even if they try to reverse it, I'm not sure it will be implemented because the Courts here in Thailand may not let it happen.

That said, again this type of a policy reversal is going to be looked on with a great deal of concern, I would probably argue by possible future foreign direct investors so I think it's worth noting that if there are cooler heads in any given room that may have some something to chime in with respect to this overall issue, I hope those cooler heads start prevailing sooner rather than later.