How to Tell a Good Cannabis Shop from a Bad One in Thailand

There are roughly ten thousand registered cannabis premises in Thailand. The range between the best and the worst is enormous, and almost all of the signal is available before you buy anything.

1. Do they ask for your prescription

This is the first test and it is close to decisive.

Since June 2025 a prescription is required for every purchase. A shop that waves it away is telling you, in the first thirty seconds, that it does not comply with a rule it can be inspected against. Whatever else it is relaxed about, you will not find out until later.

Enforcement through 2026 has been serious: over a thousand shops inspected, dozens of licences suspended. Shops that skip the prescription are not clever, they are temporary.

2. Is it in the register

Licensed premises are recorded in a government database covering roughly ninety-five percent of the market. A shop not in it is presumed illegal.

Most legitimate shops will happily tell you their licence number. Ours is on every page of this site.

3. Can you smell anything

Walk in and breathe.

A shop with good flower, stored properly, in jars being opened through the day, smells of cannabis. A shop that smells of nothing is either empty or its product has nothing left to give.

4. How is it stored

Look at where the flower lives.

Good: sealed glass, out of direct light, air conditioning running, jars that are the right size for what is in them.

Bad: a hot display case with a spotlight in it. Clear plastic tubs in a sunny window. Big jars with a tiny amount rattling around.

This is the single most reliable quality signal in the room, and the one almost nobody looks at.

5. Ask where it was grown

Not because you need the answer. Because of what happens when you ask.

Someone who knows will tell you immediately: our farm, or a grower down in San Pa Tong, or imported. Someone who does not will pause, glance at a colleague, and produce something vague.

The pause is the information.

6. Ask when it came down

Cannabis is agricultural. It has a harvest date and it degrades from then on, faster in this climate than almost anywhere.

A shop that tracks this will tell you roughly when. A shop that does not know has flower of unknown age in a country where unknown age is a real problem.

7. Look at the lab claims

If a shop prints THC percentages and terpene breakdowns on every jar, ask where they came from.

Sometimes the answer is a real lab test of that batch, which is excellent. Frequently the answer is a seed catalogue, or nothing, and the numbers are decoration. Published precision is not the same as accuracy, and a shop willing to invent one number will invent others.

We do not print percentages, because we do not test batch by batch and we are not going to publish somebody else’s numbers under our name.

8. Do they try to talk you up

A good shop asks what you are after and sometimes steers you down. If you say you have not smoked in five years and the response is to recommend the strongest thing in the case, that is a sales target talking.

What matters less than you think

Fit-out. Neon and a nice counter tell you about the build budget.

Location. A shop on the busiest tourist street is paying for that street and so are you. Some of the best value in Chiang Mai is a soi back.

Number of jars. Forty cultivars in a small shop means most of them are old. Twelve, turning over, is better.

The short version

Does it smell of cannabis, is the flower in sealed glass out of the light, do they ask for your prescription, and can they tell you where it came from without checking.

Four questions, about ninety seconds, and they sort the room.