What Changed After June 9, 2022: Thailand's Cannabis Delisting Law
After cannabis and hemp were “unlocked”, a legal loophole was created that allows the public to grow cannabis and hemp, and this is likely to increase recreational use of home-grown cannabis.
The key point of the law is that only extracts containing more than 0.2% THC by weight are classified as narcotics. As a result, the “cannabis plant” itself, such as cannabis flower buds, which is not an extract but contains as much as 10–20% THC, is no longer considered a narcotic, so people can grow the plant at home and commercially. Producing it into health products for sale, whether food, cosmetics, or herbal medicine, still requires a permit.
Now that cannabis plants have been handed out and can be grown at home, cannabis will be easier to obtain and is more likely to be used recreationally, such as by smoking, since there is not yet any law regulating this. Using cannabis is highly harmful to the brain and causes psychiatric symptoms, even with only small, occasional use.
Even though cannabis has been legally removed from the narcotics list, the reality is that cannabis still acts as a harmful addictive substance. It contains many psychoactive compounds, especially THC, which lowers intelligence (lower IQ), causes brain atrophy, leads to addiction, and raises the risk of psychosis, bipolar disorder, and cardiovascular disease, particularly in children and adolescents and in women who are pregnant or breastfeeding. The Royal College of Psychiatrists of Thailand and the Royal College of Physicians of Thailand, along with international academic evidence, confirm these facts.
Medical cannabis use should be tightly controlled and limited strictly to medical purposes. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration currently recognizes the following medical indications:
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Reducing nausea and vomiting in chemotherapy patients when standard medications have failed
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Reducing loss of appetite and weight loss in patients with HIV
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Two severe, treatment-resistant forms of epilepsy known as Lennox-Gastaut syndrome and Dravet syndrome
As you can see, the evidence base for medical cannabis is still quite limited. And when it is used to treat these conditions, it must be extracted into a pharmaceutical form with verified, controlled THC content — not consumed the way recreational cannabis is used. Even then, it is only used as an alternative treatment after standard treatments have failed. This shows that cannabis is not a miracle cure for every illness; its therapeutic benefit is limited to a narrow set of conditions, and it can cause more harm than good outside of that.
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