Thailand’s government may be backing away from a promise to ban recreational marijuana use, with one minister suggesting that it will instead seek to regulate the booming cannabis industry.
Speaking to reporters yesterday, Interior Minister Anutin Charnvirakul, the leader of the Bhumjaithai Party, said that Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin had agreed to discuss plans for a draft bill to regulate the sale and use of cannabis, rather than banning it outright.
“I would like to thank the prime minister for considering this issue and deciding to enact an act,” said Anutin, whose party was a driving force in the historic decriminalization of cannabis in mid-2022. He added that the government will allow political parties to submit draft bills to parliament for consideration alongside Bhumjaithai’s proposed legislation.
While the specifics of this bill remain unclear, the move seems likely to forestall Srettha’s controversial plan to outlaw cannabis just two years after Thailand became the first nation in Southeast Asia to legalize the drug.
Earlier this month, a drug control committee at the Ministry of Public Health approved a proposal to reclassify cannabis as a narcotic. The proposal was set to come before the Narcotics Control Board yesterday, a meeting that was preempted by the meeting with Srettha, Anutin, and Somsak. If approved, the ban would have taken effect on January 1.
However, Srettha’s controversial plan has created a fracture within his unsteady coalition government. Bhumjaithai, the second-largest party in the coalition, made cannabis decriminalization the centerpiece of its 2019 election campaign and Anutin, who served as public health minister under Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha, was a key driving force behind its eventual decriminalization.
However, Thailand took this historic step before there was a law in place to regulate the conditions around the cultivation and sale of cannabis. Bhumjaithai did subsequently draft a bill to this end, but it did not come to a vote in parliament before the May 2023 general election.
In the meantime, decriminalization created a booming recreational marijuana industry that included hundreds of cannabis shops selling myriad strains of the plant, as well as pre-rolled joints and weed-infused gummies. Amid a conservative moral panic about a spire in recreational drug use, particularly among the young, Srettha’s Pheu Thai party took a hard line on marijuana, pledging during last year’s election campaign to reintroduce controls on the drug.
In May, Srettha ordered the authorities to re-classify cannabis as a “category five” narcotic that would make it a crime to grow, possess, or consume the plant. He pledged that the ban would be in place by the end of 2024.
In recent weeks, Anutin has expressed puzzlement over this return to a punitive approach, and has pledged to oppose the recriminalization of the drug, using his position on the Narcotics Control Board to do so. While Bhumjaithai was never in favor of recreational use – Anutin’s main goal in decriminalizing cannabis was to generate a commercial industry around medical marijuana – he has stated that “we need more studies on this matter before making such a drastic move.”
The government’s further flip-flop back to a regulatory approach is clearly a political decision aimed at reducing the growing political tension between Pheu Thai and its most important coalition partner.
Of course, this will not prevent the move from being cheered, albeit warily, by the country’s small but vocal lobby of cannabis activists and entrepreneurs, who have organized daily protests outside Government House in Bangkok over the past week to protest the impending ban. In a statement yesterday, the advocacy group Writing Thailand’s Cannabis Future thanked Bhumjaithai for “protecting the cannabis policy.”
In any event, the announcement that the Thai government now plans to return to a regulatory approach, rather than swinging from one extreme to another, is welcome news for opponents of drug liberalization. It is characteristic of the loopy politics of cannabis in Thailand that the government has ended up landing on the reasonable middle ground not by design, but out of political expediency.