A customer purchasing cannabis-based products in Phuket, Thailand (Image: Michael Sainsbury)

The bars, restaurants and beaches of Thailand’s biggest holiday island Phuket are once again bustling following the devastating years of the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw wholesale business closures, queues at food banks, and drying incomes.

Tourism is back with a difference. Sitting in a busy street in Rawai at the south end of the island, the unmistakable smell of marijuana wafts in on the afternoon breeze. It’s more than a hint of smoke, intensifying as a straggling group of 20-something holiday-makers stroll by, puffing on joints with cavalier abandon.

It’s not hard to see where it came from. Elbowing for attention among the sea of mini-billboards for beer, dental services and property, and a bewildering number of 7-Eleven and Family Mart stores, are new shop fronts with names like Phuket High, Greenday, the Dope Spot and Well Weed. Many in neon green with the famous leaf, they are everywhere. On any tourist strip in Phuket or Bangkok, it’s hard to walk more than a few hundred metres without having yet another weed option.

Green is the new black in Thailand after the country’s tough-talking, drug-adverse, military-led government surprised the world last year by legalising marijuana — or ganja, as the locals prefer to call it. 

Since then it has proven both politically controversial and a tourist magnet. In the nation’s explosion of weed shops, punters can buy rolled joints and grams of a bewildering number of varieties with names like AK-47, White Widow and California Snow. Then there are CBD oil and tinctures and a range of gummies, cookies, chocolates and drinks — even flavoured ice cream tubs.

Edible sweets sold in Phuket, Thailand (Image: Michael Sainsbury)

Big Weed has sniffed the opportunity and already arrived in the shape of US multi-national Cookies, which announced last month that it would open the first US-brand cannabis dispensary in Thailand. 

“The launch of Cookies Thailand marks a milestone for the brand as it enters its sixth country and becomes the 58th Cookies storefront worldwide,” the company said, and it’s all too true that the Thais love a brand.

Alongside its US stores, Cookies has franchises in Canada, Israel, the Netherlands and Spain. Its Thai business is a venture with a local company under the country’s business regulations. So much for counter-culture.

But like so many things in the Land of Smiles, all is never quite what it seems. Despite the vast range of cannabis products available in shops, bars and dispensaries, it is only smokeable marijuana that has strictly been legalised. Much of the rest — the oils and edibles — operate in the same sort of grey area as sex work, which most foreigners are surprised to learn is not and has never been legal in the country.

Politically the herb has become a football and is now a serious point of difference between some of the biggest players in the country’s often confusing multi-party system. The push for legalisation came from Thailand’s Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul. In January last year, the nation’s Food and Drug Administration removed cannabis from the list of illegal drugs, an effective decriminalisation that took effect June 9.

Cannabis legislation was promised to regulate the industry, but this has been stymied by conservative political elements; nothing much looks like changing with a general election due in May.

Promising to reverse the ruling and recriminalise weed in the country is the Pheu Thai Party, the largest and most cohesive opposition party. It was pushed at gunpoint from office in the May 2014 coup that saw General Prayuth Chan-ocha step in as prime minister, a post in which he remains. Pheu Thai’s base is in the rural north of Thailand and its de facto leader remains former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who remains in exile after fleeing a 2006 coup.

Meanwhile, the base for Anutin’s Bhumjaithai Party — a major player in the ruling coalition — are farmers in a nation that is still very agricultural. They see marijuana as a potential path to prosperity and Anutin will be hoping to strip voters from Pheu Thai and perhaps move into the calculus for the top job.

There are many, many moving parts in Thai politics, but whatever happens at the May poll, and the jockeying for the post of prime minister among a dozen or so parties that will follow, the hard reality is that such things are extremely hard to unwind. In recent decades Thailand has ceded plenty of ground in the South-East Asian tourist sector it once dominated so formidably to the likes of Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia.

Talking to tourists this week, it’s clear that legalising dope has given the country a fresh edge amongst a range of demographics. For a nation whose pre-COVID GDP was 20% reliant on tourism, money from the grey areas has always found a way.