Is Thailand’s PM More Concerned About Sound Cannabis Policy or Political Optics?

Amid a rise in smuggling, Anutin Charnvirakul has recently come out against the policy he once championed: the decriminalization of marijuana.

Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul is most known outside Thailand for two things: his 2026 center-right electoral victory and his advocacy for the legalization of marijuana in Thailand. Those two things will always be related, as recently he warned he might shut down the booming industry due to a rise in cannabis trafficking out of Thailand. “We need to figure out what we should do to prevent other countries from blaming Thailand as being the weak link in this problem,” Anutin warned.

Critical European partners have seen a rise in cannabis smuggling, as Germany recently reported two seizures of 1.2 tonnes with a street value of $13 million, both inbound from Thailand. And the pressure is rising, since the issue may threaten Thailand’s OECD bid.

Internal criticism of Anutin for these failures came right as the Thai leader saw a major drop in public support, from 29.4 percent of the public preferring him as the leading choice for prime minister in a NIDA poll in January to just 21.7 percent in early July. Consequently, Anutin might very well pull the trigger and reverse one of the country’s most significant policy shifts in recent memory – one that he himself advocated for years.

The cost of this, however, would be to doom an emerging industry, and there are other ways of solving the short-term optical challenges facing his government.

First, Thailand’s initial attempt to manage cannabis through milder policy reforms failed to curb unregulated consumption, eventually forcing the government to introduce medical-only restrictions between late 2025 and mid-2026. While these restrictions were catastrophic for the domestic industry, forcing 7,000 cannabis shops to close due to the heavy costs of compliance, they have also failed to stop drug trafficking. Instead, the domestic market has created incentive for growers to smuggle excess supply overseas. According to the Thai Customs Department, between October 1, 2025, and June 30, 2026, Thai authorities intercepted more than 3,300 illegal shipments, seizing over 37,000 kilograms of cannabis valued at $14 million. The regulations have thus pushed the domestic market into an active ring of drug smuggling.

This is where the logic of a proposed shutdown fails. The legal marijuana industry is not the source of the problem. Further, when Thailand’s health minister argued earlier this month in favor of a draft Cannabis and Hemp Act, he called for greater action to combat smuggling and stop the spread of fake licenses, but not regulation of the cannabis industry itself. If the rationale of for the new Act is to fight criminality, there is no reason to punish thousands of legally-compliant businesses and producers.

The process of passing the Act itself has been problematic, as it has repeatedly failed to overcome legislative hurdles. Passage of the bill appears to be trapped by a regulatory and institutional minefield, where the market is subject to an array of different legal statutes, and businesses must navigate several ministerial decrees. The........

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