Thailand reneges on legalization of recreational marijuana, and changes absolutely nothing

Let me explain a little bit about what I mean here. Thailand made news waves a bit ago when they became the first country in this part of the world to legalize the recreational use of marijuana. Previously it had been very easy to find just like it is almost anywhere else in the world, but it was always black market and not of terribly good quality.

I say this as someone that doesn't really indulge a great deal but has friends that do. Normally they would be subjected to having access to whatever the dealers happened to have which was normally compressed bud that had been smuggled in the country in those bricks that most of us have only seen on police stings.

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When Thailand first legalized it for recreational purposes they at first tried to implement this in stages, with proper licenses and what not but as I predicted once this news became public, that all went out the window once corruption set in as it tends to in this country. There are thousands of shops in Thailand and tens of thousands of licenses both for retail and grow operations. In a very short amount of time basically every single street had a dispensary or weed-cafe on it. It quickly went from being kind of cool to being WAY TOO MUCH - as is often the case here.

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No matter where you went there was a weed shop with the ubiquitous neon leaf in the window. Although the rules were always that you cannot smoke the weed in the shops or even in public for that matter, Thailand was kidding themselves that anyone was actually going to follow these rules and it was amusing that the police started selling "licenses" to certain establishments to be declared "designated weed smoking areas"

The funny thing about "laws" in Thailand is that they tend to only apply to you if you don't have money and therefore the corner pubs would get cracked down on for this but the large clubs with wealthy patrons got to do whatever they wanted. This is just normal here and I presume elsewhere in the world.

What started out at a good thing, even in my mind as a person that doesn't care for smoking weed, quickly turned into a blemish on the country. This was especially true in tourist areas where basically every single shop had a weed section in it, regardless of what kind of shop you were in. I knew we had hit the end of the line when I saw bags of chips/crisps for sale in Lotus's (it's Tesco rebranded) that had marijuana leaves on the packaging prominently located near regular food items. These chips contained zero THC, but were just attempting to cash in on the craze.

It was really easy for certain politicians, who were opposed to it being legal in the first place, to latch on to these operations and suggest that the companies were attempting to lure in children.

That is the defense they are using now since it has been removed as something that is legal for recreational use.

However, for anyone who was thinking of having a weed holiday or vacation, fret not. This doesn't really change anything.

Now in order to be able to imbibe you have to have a doctor's note that states that you NEED the WEED for some sort of made up ailment and the dispensaries will no doubt, just relocate to be nearby a clinic that specializes in exactly that.

let me tell you what a doctor's consultation for being "allowed medicinal marijuana" is going to go like ok? It is very similar to the "clean bill of health" that I have to get every year for my work permit.

you go into a clinic, just any ol' clinic, with your passport and tell them you need a doctor's note, they may ask you what it is for and you don't need to be ashamed to say "ganja"... trust me, you won't be the first person to ask for this. They will then take your passport, jot a few bits of information on a piece of paper, use a stamp of the doctor's signature, some other stamp, charge you $3 and off you go. You are now medically qualified to buy marijuana at your leisure.

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_{seriously, there are way too many of these operations}

For my work permit it isn't for weed, obviously, but the process is the same. In 7 years I have never so much as even spoken to an actual doctor during this process.

It's a joke, it's dumb, and I guess if anything good is going to come out of this it will make it more difficult for kids to get weed and perhaps bring down the number of dispensaries to a more reasonable amount of them.

So for the people in the news celebrating that weed is illegal again, they are wrong. For the people crying that this is setting Thailand back from being progressive, they are also wrong. All this is accomplishes is that some politicians get to have their names and faces in the papers and now there is more bureaucracy involved in the process.

I can't imagine what the end goal is here but I suspect it is so that elected officials can appear as though they are actually doing a job.