SCENE REPORT: THAI WEED

Walk with me through the streets of Thailand, where DIY weed shops are thriving

A recent trip to Thailand afforded a rare chance to investigate the country’s newly-legal weed scene, which offers a refreshing taste of Asian stoner culture outside the American pop culture canon. Below, the joys of Thai weed kiosk, local stoner delicacies and aesthetics, and the untold history of cannabis in Thailand. In the upcoming part two, interviews with dispensary owners on the chaotic state of the scene. Plus, I get my Singaporean parents to touch weed for the first time!

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On a family vacation to the resort town of Krabi in Thailand, my little sister poked me and squealed: “Look—cannabis cafes!” Roadside stalls hawking fake Escada dresses, fried bananas, and kitschy souvenirs whizzed by our van window as I craned my neck for a closer look. The sight of a legal weed dispensary—in Asia!—seemed too surreal. Yet there they were, shimmering in the tropical heat like mirages, each marked by the neon green leaf that’s an international bat signal for stoners.

We’ve been waiting for this moment for years. In 2019, Thailand became the first country in Southeast Asia to legalize medical marijuana, with the Bhumjaithai Party riding the new policy to power by pitching locally-grown cannabis as the new cash crop for Thai farmers. That year, I organized a panel on the future of Thai cannabis at Wonderfruit festival—a project that gave me the chance to live in Bangkok for a few months while researching the history and culture of Thai weed.

I grew up in Singapore and Tokyo, where the stigma and social repercussions of drug use are super severe. Uncovering a rich tradition of weed culture in Thailand was revelatory—up until then, I’d always associated stoner culture with American pop culture, but here, it was connected to something more ancient and ancestral—and practiced by people who looked like me. Cannabis has been one of Thailand’s traditional medicines for centuries, often added into herbal soups and other dishes, especially in the Hmong tribe "hemp villages” in the Northern highlands.

Hemp scarf made in Thailand (All photos by moi)

Weed grows beautifully in Thailand’s tropical climate, and the country became one of the top exporters of the world, with farmers in the Northeast cultivating it with the panache of French vintners with grapevines. In the 60s and 70s, Thai Sticks—a local form of preparation where the whole plant, from flowers to seeds to petioles, are compressed into briquettes—even became a luxury product, smuggled by soldiers and hippies to the US and Europe and often sold for more than the price of Cuban cigars. But in the 80s, the US coerced Thai officials to assist them in Nixon’s War on Drugs, and the Western moral stigma around cannabis began to colonize the Asian lands where it had been seen as little more than a medicinal plant.

Thailand is now one of the world’s epicenters of the meth epidemic, with four in five inmates in its overcrowded prisons incarcerated for drug offenses. When medical cannabis was legalized in 2019, it was seen as a step towards softening the government’s hardline approach. A UN official from Thailand told me that cannabis use would be limited to sick patients at local hospitals, but activists and entrepreneurs promised it wouldn’t take long for the country to go all in. They were right: in June 2022, Thailand decriminalized weed for everyone but pregnant moms and minors.

Map of weed stores in Chiang Mai

Since then, the weed shops sprouting up in Bangkok’s main arteries like Khao San Road have become international news. But what is less obvious from afar is how cannabis is everywhere in Thailand. Krabi—a beach paradise known for its dramatic limestone cliffs and emerald lagoons—has no less than 26 listed shops on Google Maps. I mean, there was even weed-flavored water at the airport. 

That night, I took a post-dinner walk to check out the weed shops in our area. My parents, born and raised in no-drugs-dystopia Singapore, decided to come along—they said they wanted to make sure I’d be safe, but I think they were kinda curious too ;) The Thai weed shops we strolled by fell into three categories: