A Short History of Cannabis in Thailand

Thailand did not discover cannabis in 2022. It spent most of the twentieth century with a ban that arrived from outside, sitting on top of a much older relationship with the plant.

Before prohibition

Cannabis grew across what is now Thailand for a very long time and was treated as an ordinary agricultural crop.

It appears in traditional Thai medicine formulations, used for pain, sleep and appetite. Those preparations were part of an established system taught and practised for generations, not folk experimentation.

It also appears in food. Cannabis leaves went into some regional dishes, notably certain boat noodle broths, where a few leaves were used the way any herb would be. The effect was mild to negligible. It was seasoning.

None of this was remarkable at the time, which is rather the point.

1935, the ban

The Cannabis Act B.E. 2477 prohibited cannabis in Thailand in 1935.

The pressure was largely external. The early twentieth century saw a series of international conventions building a global drug control framework, driven mostly by the United States and European powers, and countries across Asia came under pressure to align. Thailand aligned.

So a plant that had been in Thai medicine and Thai kitchens for centuries became illegal, on a timetable set elsewhere. That history matters for understanding why the 2022 legalisation was framed in Thailand as a reclaiming rather than a liberalisation.

The 1960s and 70s, Thai stick

Prohibition did not stop cultivation, and during the Vietnam War era Thailand became a significant exporter.

Thai stick was the famous product: cannabis flower tied around a thin bamboo skewer with hemp fibre, sometimes in bundles. It had a reputation for exceptional potency and travelled widely, largely through American servicemen on leave.

Whether it deserved the reputation is debated. Some of it was the genetics, equatorial sativas with long flowering times and distinctive profiles. Some of it was that the people describing it were very far from home and unusually impressed.

Either way, Thai stick put Thai cannabis on the international map, and the original landrace genetics behind it are still sought after by breeders today.

1979 onwards, the hard years

The Narcotics Act B.E. 2522 of 1979 hardened the position, and through the 1980s and 90s Thailand ran an aggressive drug enforcement policy under heavy international pressure, particularly around the Golden Triangle.

Penalties were severe. Cannabis was grouped with substances it has little in common with, and a great deal of traditional knowledge was lost in the process, because you cannot teach a medicine you cannot legally possess.

2018 to 2022, the turn

2018: Thailand legalised medical cannabis, the first country in Southeast Asia to do so. Framed explicitly around traditional Thai medicine and the economic potential for Thai farmers.

9 June 2022: Cannabis was removed from the narcotics list altogether. Thailand became the first country in Asia to do so, and the government distributed a million plants to households.

What followed was extraordinary and chaotic. Thousands of shops opened within a year, because delisting arrived well ahead of any framework to govern it. Everyone knew a correction was coming.

2025 and 2026, the correction

26 June 2025: Cannabis flower was reclassified as a controlled herb under the Traditional Medicine Act, requiring a PT 33 prescription from a licensed practitioner. This ended the open recreational market.

30 April 2026: Ministerial Regulation No. 2 B.E. 2569 set out what a licensed dispensary must have in place, and the number of shops began falling.

A draft Cannabis and Hemp Act finished public consultation on 21 May 2026 and has not yet passed parliament.

Where that leaves things

Thailand is somewhere between two models and has been for a while. Not the open market of 2022 to 2025, not the prohibition of 1935 to 2018. A regulated medical framework, sitting on top of a much older tradition, with legislation still unfinished.

Read it against the full history and it is less strange than it looks. The plant was here a long time before the ban, and the current framework is explicitly built on the traditional medicine system rather than imported from a western recreational model.

For what the rules mean today, start here.