“For One Week It Was Basil”
Thailand legalized cannabis. Then it reversed course. The backlash is reshaping Southeast Asia’s drug policy — an interview with Kitty Chopaka.
When Thailand removed cannabis from its narcotics list in 2022, international media quickly framed the decision as either a movement breakthrough or a national failure. Neither captures what unfolded. Behind the headlines, Thailand became a real-time stress test of how new cannabis markets form and fracture under political and economic pressure. Kitty Chopaka, a Thai cannabis advocate, was operating one of Bangkok’s early licensed shops while participating in discussions shaping the new regulatory framework.
Parabola Center sat down with her to document how the transition unfolded in practice and examine what Thailand’s experience reveals about the vulnerabilities facing emerging cannabis markets worldwide. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Responses have been lightly structured for readability while preserving meaning.
Damian Fagon: The 2022 decriminalization in Thailand is often described in the West as creating a regulatory vacuum. Is that an accurate description?
Kitty Chopaka: It was not decriminalized, it was descheduled. Cannabis flower buds were removed from Thailand’s Schedule 5 narcotics list, but extracts above 0.1 percent THC, including vapes, gummies, and dabs, remained narcotics punishable by up to ten years in prison.
The descheduling of flower triggered an automatic process that gave the government 120 days to pass a formal cannabis law. The day after descheduling, the ruling party submitted the Cannabis Act to establish the industry. Because they were part of a coalition government with the majority vote, they believed they could pass it within that window. Unfortunately, we were still coming out of COVID, and the parliamentary calendar was pushed back. We simply did not get it done in time.
So after that 120 day window closed, cannabis flower became legal across Thailand without any guiding legislation or regulations?
Once the 120 days passed, it simply became legal. For one week it was basil. The government eventually found an existing traditional medicine law to park it under, which was overseen by the Health Ministry.
Shops were allowed to sell but required licenses. We had to record names, passport numbers, dates of birth, and purchase quantities. Sales were restricted to those over twenty and barred for pregnant or breastfeeding customers.
This Health Ministry division already existed, but it was not built for a few hundred of us to arrive on the same day. There were only three people working there at the very beginning, though I believe they are now up to ten. At that stage, you could only sell buds in raw form with minor trimming. Because cannabis was still classified as an agricultural raw material, there was no dedicated tax structure, only licensing and reporting requirements.
You focused heavily on localism at your shop. How was it working with Thai cannabis farmers during that initial launch of the market?
I only supplied Thai products. I supported more than fifty farms, from large CBD operations to small bedroom growers supporting their families. Even the bongs and jars in my shop were made by local artists.
I treated the shop as an education space where we explained terpene profiles, cultivation styles, indoor versus outdoor, and the difference between premium and mid-grade products. Most customers did not understand those distinctions yet, so we had to teach them. I also created standard operating guides that other shops could copy, including what was legal and safe use guidelines. These were things licensed stores still getting the hang of the market could print and put on their walls. For about six months, it felt like something sustainable might form. Then the bubble burst.
Sounds familiar! When did foreign imports start flooding the market?
It happened almost instantly. On the first day of descheduling, I was celebrating with a friend who had spent two years building a high-tech indoor facility to meet the strict requirements of the old medical scheme. He built everything including air showers, viewing rooms, and mother rooms required by the Ministry of Public Health to supply local hospitals with cannabis oil. He finally got his medical license the day before descheduling, and by the next morning, that license was effectively null and void because the rules changed.
By 10:00 AM that same day, I got a call from a man I had met at a big American cannabis conference saying he already had 40 tons of “Cali-level” weed in Thailand. I almost cried because my friend was sitting there with 500 grams that took him years to grow properly, and the market was already being flooded. Importers were dropping off kilos at stores for free and only asking for payment after they sold, which wiped out local growers. I knew most of the domestic farms, so I could tell by the smell when something was not local.
Even now, American celebrities are here selling illegal products while their market cap goes up, and it infuriates me. I finally understood how it works. We have the same sets of people going from one new market to the next to stimulate legalization. They benefit both on the table and under it, and the bubble bursts faster every time.
By 2024 the industry was being blamed for a rise in youth access and public smoking. Was the backlash justified, or was there something else going on?
There were really two separate controversies. One involved tourist-driven public smoking and shops openly selling prohibited products like gummies and extracts to tourists. The other involved anti-cannabis religious groups amplifying selective youth use and hospital statistics.
Selling to kids was already illegal, but they weren’t enforcing the law. No one was doing anything about it. The police just add an extra price. You want to sell to kids, then that’s an extra too. Everything has a price. It’s down to your own morality as a shop owner whether you do it. I had a few shakedowns, but I didn’t realize it was a shakedown. I was naive.
The rise in use numbers did not match the level of panic. In 2024, the Office of the Narcotics Control Board released data for ages fifteen to sixty-five showing roughly one million monthly users, but only around three hundred thousand using at a near-daily frequency in a country of seventy million. We do not have a high level of daily users.
The rising use and public smoking came from tourists and expats, predominantly from countries with legal markets or a high rates of use. It also came from neighboring countries where cannabis is heavily criminalized and there is no education or proper etiquette for consuming in social settings. The backlash intensified during the election cycle that year, and cannabis became a political weapon between the rival parties.
With the market in freefall and a complete lack of oversight, how did your business navigate the resulting public backlash?
I had already shut down my shop by early 2025. The decision was a mix of a stagnant market and a landlord who could not provide the necessary paperwork for my license, but it was also a choice to pivot back to education. I realized that after three years, no one was actually educating the public, and consumers were not any smarter about the plant. Without that foundation, people remained easily persuaded by propaganda. As the government stance turned aggressive, the old stigma returned, and we were quickly recategorized from heroes back into the demons we were before.
In June 2025, three years in to this experiment, the Thai government reverses their stance on recreational cannabis and restricts flower to medical-use only. What did this look like on the ground?
Customers now need a prescription to buy from a licensed shop. The document is valid for thirty days, and the shop must keep it as part of its compliance paperwork. However, the prescription only applies at the retail counter. You do not need one to grow your own, to possess cannabis, or to get it from someone else. It regulates the shop sale, not the plant itself.
You can go to a Thai traditional doctor, or even certain other licensed practitioners like dentists, to have it written. There is no stated purchase limit on the form; you could technically write 100 kilograms on there if you wanted. The shop has to retain that document, including your symptoms and diagnosis, even though the shop staff are not medical professionals. There is no privacy, no confidentiality, and no real medical relationship.
Now, there are telemedicine services where you simply join a call to get a prescription issued. Most of the time, it is just processing paperwork so the transaction can be considered legal under the new rules.
Alongside the new prescription system, the government mandated GACP (Good Agricultural and Collection Practice) standards for licensed cannabis growers. How did these international requirements impact local farmers?
GACP was lobbied for by people who wanted to export. It is based on a sixty-year old World Health Organization framework that was originally set up as an optional opt-in. But the government eventually applied it to everyone . A shop can now only sell flower if they provide documentation proving their supplier farm has GACP certification.
It feels like colonization. You take an international standard and impose it on a domestic market without adapting it to local realities. Fewer than two hundred farms in the country have GACP certification, and when the requirement first expanded, the number was even lower.
The audit visit alone costs around 30,000 baht, which is twice the average monthly salary in Thailand. A farmer then has to pay another 20,000 baht in consultant fees, travel, hotels, and transportation for the auditor. Small growers cannot absorb those costs.
We ended up with thousands of licensed shops but less than 100 farms they were legally allowed to buy from. Because the requirement was applied so quickly, the legal supply pool shrank while the number of shops did not. Thousands of small farmers simply fell out of the licensed system.
Were these standards driven by public health concerns, or were they a deliberate attempt to stifle the industry?
They were lobbied for to create a moat around the industry and make it harder for new people to enter the space. While I understand that kind of standard for export markets, it should not apply uniformly to the domestic market. As a member of the drafting committee, I helped write a version of the law that included a tiered compliance system to prevent exactly this kind of bottleneck
The government originally wanted to move cannabis back onto the narcotics list, but they could not because we kept fighting. We used every tool available, including hunger strikes, to prevent recriminalization. Since they could not ban the plant outright, they chose to control it through regulatory power instead. They studied the law carefully and put a significant barrier in front of us.
You are now challenging these regulatory shifts in court. What is the status of those legal efforts?
We have filed legal challenges arguing that the way the requirement was expanded violates constitutional principles regarding fairness and access. Administrative court filings are currently underway. The process moves slowly and it could take years to reach a resolution.
With the recreational market gone and domestic production hollowed out, are foreign imports still dominating the market?
Right now the impact is most visible on the extract and gummy side. Because of how the law is structured, we cannot actually manufacture those products within our own industry, so they are still coming in from the outside.
The other issue involves the growers here, who are still slowly shutting down. This was most prominent from 2023 into last year, when we saw a lot of arrests involving foreign operators. We had Vietnamese, Chinese, Russians, and Israelis are all here growing cannabis. The global weed growing economy essentially descended on Thailand. Everything is cheaper here, we have close access to China, and there is a lot of corruption. If you have money to throw at the police, they will be happy. It is like a petri dish, and we are the best jelly to grow in.
Looking forward, what is your hope for the future of cannabis in Thailand?
I am waiting for the current system to die down so we can come out of the ashes and start smarter. The industry attracted a lot of quick money, including money laundering at its peak, but that phase is already fading
I am still angry about how easily our strains and knowledge were used without people really understanding the culture around them. We have used cannabis here for a long time, and elders still chew the flowers. We have outdoor cultivars adapted to our climate, and some even turn purple in the heat and smell like mango. That heritage is ignored when an industry arrives fully formed from somewhere else.
My hope is that we rebuild slower and smarter in a way that fits Thailand. Our system is slow and conservative, so it has to settle at its own pace. Appreciate, but do not appropriate. Perhaps you grow the Granny Smith apple and we grow the mango, and then we trade. If our mangoes are forced into your system, they end up tasting like Granny Smiths, and I do not like that.
How can the U.S. cannabis industry move from just taking and exploiting new markets to a more respectful, fair-trade relationship?
Everyone brings something to the table. We have parties too. Think of it less like a potluck and more like a Korean-style barbecue where everyone brings something and everyone is sharing and cooking together. That is how you end up with a balanced meal. But you do not take everything that is cooking on the stove before it is ready.
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