Cannabis in Bangkok: the flower rules bind the shop, the extract rules bind you

Since June 2025 most English-language advice has said the same thing: cannabis is illegal in Thailand again unless you have a prescription. That is not what the Royal Gazette says, and the gap runs in both directions. Almost every rule about the flower — the prescription, the thirty days, the ban on apps and websites — is a condition on the seller’s licence, and the prescription itself stays behind the counter. The rules that reach you personally sit in other laws, and the most dangerous of them is about oil, not flower: an extract is a narcotic unless it is weak, licensed and made from plants grown in Thailand.

Three notices in four years, and what each one did

The single most useful thing to know about Thai cannabis law is that it is not one law. The plant left the narcotics list in 2022 by a ministerial notice under the Narcotics Code, and was caught on the way out by a different statute entirely: the Traditional Medicine Wisdom Act B.E. 2542, a 1999 law written to protect Thai herbal knowledge and endangered medicinal plants, which lets the Minister of Public Health designate a herb as “controlled” and license what is done with it. Everything since has been a notice or a regulation under one of those two laws, and each one replaced the last.

Look at the third row, because it explains a great deal of what is still circulating. The notice of June 2022 is the only instrument in this history that ever spoke to the user directly — it gave adults a positive permission and took away one thing, smoking in public. It lasted five months. Guides that tell you the controlled-herb rules ban public smoking or require you to be 20 are describing a text that was repealed in November 2022, and the rule that replaced it was addressed to shops.

What the 2025 notice actually says

The notice that everyone calls the end of “free cannabis” is two pages long. It was signed by the Minister of Public Health on 23 June 2025, published in the Royal Gazette on 25 June and in force from 26 June. Its preamble is worth quoting, because the ministry wrote into it the reason the notice exists: it says the notice is needed because, “at present, there is still no law to control it specifically”. The ministry was using the herb statute because it had nothing else.

Clause 3 keeps the 2022 scope: only the flower of any plant of the genus Cannabis is a controlled herb. The genus wording means hemp flower is included; leaves, stems, roots and seeds are not controlled herbs at all. Clause 4 then says that anyone who wishes to study, export, sell or process a controlled herb for trade may do so only with a licence under section 46, and attaches eight conditions to the licence:

• keep records of where the flower came from, what it was used for and how much is in store, and report them;
• notify each export shipment separately;
• a licensee who sells or processes for trade may sell only to another section 46 licensee;
• everything sold or exported must come from a source certified by the department for good cultivation and harvesting practice;
• no sale for smoking on the premises, except by a medical, Thai-medicine, folk-healer, Chinese-medicine or dental practitioner treating their own patients;
• no sale of the flower or anything processed from it through a vending machine, an electronic channel or a computer network;
• no advertising in any channel for trade;
• no sale in temples or other places of religious ceremony, in dormitories under the Dormitory Act, or in public parks, zoos and amusement parks.

The retail trade exists only because of the paragraph that follows. It says that the “sell only to licensees” rule does not include selling to any person who holds a prescription, issued for medical benefit, by a medical doctor, a Thai traditional medicine practitioner, an applied Thai traditional medicine practitioner, a certified folk healer, a Chinese-medicine practitioner, a pharmacist or a dentist. The last paragraph fixes the quantity: as necessary for treatment, and for no more than thirty days.

Notice what disappeared between 2022 and 2025. The explicit bans on selling to under-20s, to pregnant and breastfeeding women and to students are not in the 2025 text. The notice no longer needs them, since a sale to anyone without a prescription is outside the licence altogether — but it means that a guide quoting “the under-20 rule” as a line of the current notice is quoting the 2022 one.

The prescription is the shop’s document, not yours

The department fixed the form a week later, in a notice signed on 30 June 2025. Form ภ.ท.33 is headed “prescription for a controlled herb (cannabis)”, and it is a single page. The prescriber ticks one of seven professions and gives a licence or certificate number. The patient’s section asks for name, age, nationality, and an identity card or passport number — the form was drawn up with foreign patients in mind. Then the condition or symptoms, and a dose written as grams of flower per day, times a number of days, equals a total.

Three printed notes sit under the dose. The first says the prescription may cover no more than thirty days. The other two concern the diagnosis: that it is consistent with the practice guidelines and indications for medical cannabis of the prescriber’s own profession, and that it matches any other medical documentation supporting the buyer’s use of medical cannabis. Both the prescriber and the recipient sign.

And then the line almost nobody quotes, printed at the foot of the form: the operator keeps it at the dispensing premises for one year from the day of dispensing, for inspection. The prescription is the shop’s evidence that it sold within its licence. It stays at the counter. We found nothing in the notice, the form or the Act that requires the buyer to carry proof of where the flower came from — which fits the rest of the design, because nothing in them makes the buyer’s side of the sale an offence either.

Who the rules are actually addressed to

The offences live in the parent Act, not in the notice, and the Act is short enough to read in full. Section 46 says no one may study or export a controlled herb, or sell or process a controlled herb for trade, without a licence. Section 3 defines “sell” widely — to sell, dispense, give away or exchange, including possessing for sale — so a free “sample” handed out to drum up trade is a sale. Section 78 punishes breach of section 46 with up to one year’s imprisonment or a fine of up to 20,000 baht, or both. A July 2025 summary of cannabis offences prepared by provincial public-health pharmacists, and republished by a local municipality, gives the same figures, which is our cross-check that they have not moved.

A licensed shop that breaks one of the clause 4 conditions — selling to someone with no prescription, selling through an app, selling in a park — faces the licensing authority rather than a criminal court: suspension for up to ninety days at a time under section 52, and revocation under section 54 for a serious breach, after which it cannot hold any licence under the Act for two years.

What the Act does not contain is an offence for the other side of the counter. Section 45 does let the minister set a quantity above which possession of a controlled herb must be reported, and section 79 punishes failure to report. But the 2025 notice was issued under section 45(3) to (6), not 45(1): it sets no quantity, so there is nothing to report and nothing to breach. We read every penalty section in chapter 7 of the Act, and none of them is addressed to a buyer, a holder or a user of the flower.

This is not our idiosyncratic reading. A network of doctors, academics and campaigners opposed to the 2022 policy wrote to the health minister in June 2026 asking for the plant to be put back on the narcotics list, and their own diagram of the current position says, in terms, that there is no law prohibiting recreational use of the plant. The people who most want that to change agree that it is the present law.

The flower is a herb. The oil is a narcotic.

The rule that can actually put a buyer in prison is not in the herb law at all. It is item (3) of the Category 5 narcotics listing signed on 8 February 2022, and it is drafted the opposite way round from how English guides describe it. It does not say “extracts over 0.2% THC are narcotics”. It says that extracts from every part of the cannabis or hemp plant are Category 5 narcotics, and then makes two exceptions:

• extracts containing no more than 0.2% THC by weight, and only those licensed to be extracted from cannabis or hemp grown in Thailand; and
• extracts from the seeds of cannabis or hemp grown in Thailand.

So an extract escapes the narcotics list only if three things are all true: it is weak, its extraction was licensed, and the plants were grown here. A CBD oil bought abroad fails the third test whatever its THC content. An oil made at home fails the second. A strong oil fails the first. On the text, each of them is a Category 5 narcotic in Thailand.

What counts as an extract? The listing does not define the word. The March 2026 ministerial regulation on licensing extracts does define producing one, as extraction by any method “with or without a solvent” to obtain cannabinoids or other compounds of the plant. Whether a particular concentrate is an extract is ultimately a question for a court, but the regulator’s own definition expressly reaches methods that use no solvent at all.

What the Narcotics Code does with that

Once something is Category 5, the Narcotics Code applies to the person holding it, not just to the business that sold it:

Section 104 has a medical exception: use of a Category 5 narcotic for treatment on the order of a doctor, a dentist, a Thai or applied Thai traditional medicine practitioner or a folk healer, within what the minister has specified. And section 165 tells the courts that in these cases treatment is to be preferred to punishment. Neither of those is a defence to buying a cartridge off a shelf.

The March 2026 regulation, in force from 26 April 2026, is sometimes described as legalising extracts. It does not. It opens licences to produce, import, export, sell and possess cannabis and hemp extracts for four purposes only — state anti-narcotics work, medical benefit, analysis and research, and industry — and requires producers and importers to be state agencies, the Thai Red Cross or juristic persons that are not foreign under the Foreign Business Act. The extracts it deals with are still, in its own definition, Category 5 narcotics. It is a licensing channel for businesses, not a permission for consumers.

What that means for the things actually on sale

For the vape device itself — the 2014 import prohibition, the 2015 sale ban and the argument about possession — see our guide to smoking and vaping in Bangkok. A cannabis cartridge carries both sets of problems at once.

Smoke: the test is your neighbour’s health, not the street

The notice people mean when they say “public smoking is banned” was signed on 13 June 2022 under section 25 of the Public Health Act, and it is a nuisance notice, not a smoking ban. Its operative clause declares that causing the smell or smoke of cannabis, hemp or any other plant, except plants already controlled by another law, to the extent that it degrades or may endanger the health of people living nearby or of people exposed to it, is a nuisance under the public-health law.

That is an effects test with no geography in it. It does not name streets, parks or beaches, and it applies as much to a balcony as to a pavement. What it does is bring cannabis smoke into the same machinery our noise-complaints guide explains in detail for sound. The local official — in Bangkok, the Governor, exercising the power through the district office — can order the person responsible in writing to stop or prevent the nuisance within a stated time, under section 27 for a public place and section 28 for a private one. It is ignoring that order that section 74 punishes, with up to three months’ imprisonment or a fine of up to 25,000 baht or both. The figure that English guides attach to “smoking in public” is the penalty for disobeying a district order.

That cuts both ways. If you are the one who smokes, the rule is not “somewhere private is fine”: a condominium balcony whose smoke drifts into a neighbour’s bedroom is closer to the notice’s wording than a joint on an empty street. If you are the neighbour, the route is the district office, and our noise guide’s advice on logs, corroborating neighbours and what a court treats as severe enough applies unchanged. A building’s registered regulations or your lease can go further than the law; the nuisance notice is the floor, not the ceiling.

Shops are covered twice. The 2025 notice forbids a licensee to sell cannabis for smoking on its premises unless the seller is a practitioner treating their own patients, and the April 2026 licensing regulation requires every flower licensee to have an effective odour and smoke elimination system at the premises.

Driving

Section 43 of the Land Traffic Act, as rewritten by the 2022 amendment that came into force in September of that year, forbids driving “while impaired in the ability to drive” and “while drunk on liquor or other intoxicants”. Neither limb needs the substance to be a narcotic, and the words “other intoxicants” are wide. The Act’s separate provision on driving under the influence of narcotics and psychotropic substances, section 43 bis, is the one that would apply to an extract. Drunk driving under section 43(2) and section 43 bis both sit on the short list of traffic offences that remain criminal rather than administrative, which our guide to traffic tickets and fines sets out. We found no published THC limit for drivers and no roadside test threshold, so we print none.

Leaving Thailand with it

This is where the herb law bites the individual, on its words. Section 46 is drafted in two halves: no one may study or export a controlled herb, or sell or process a controlled herb for trade, without a licence. The phrase “for trade” sits at the end of the second half. Section 3 defines “export” as taking or sending out of the Kingdom, which is what carrying flower in your luggage does. Section 45(5) separately empowers the minister to set conditions for export “for trade and not for trade”, which suggests the Act contemplates non-commercial export as something to be licensed.

There is an argument the other way. The Act’s own fee schedule groups the export licence with the trade licences, and the 2025 notice repeats the list of activities with “for trade” at the end. We have not found a court ruling or an official statement applying section 46 to a traveller’s bag, so we print the text and not a prediction. The penalty if it does apply is section 78’s: up to a year or 20,000 baht.

Extracts are simpler. Exporting a Category 5 narcotic without a licence is squarely section 93 of the Narcotics Code, with the penalties in the table above. And every destination has its own law. To take one documented example, Singapore’s Misuse of Drugs Act has since 1998 applied its consumption offence to Singapore citizens and permanent residents who use drugs overseas — so for them, what was lawful in Bangkok is not the end of the question. Do not post it either: the prohibited-goods list quoted in our guide to sending things home still names marijuana and hemp, and DHL’s published conditions exclude cannabis and its derivatives.

We did not establish which instrument governs bringing flower into Thailand, so we say nothing about it beyond this: an extract arriving from abroad is a Category 5 import, and it cannot meet the Thai-grown condition.

Reading the shop in front of you

A licence to sell a controlled herb runs, under section 46, until 31 December of the third year counting from the year it was issued. The health minister said in September 2026 that existing shop licences are expiring in stages across 2026, 2027 and 2028, and the April 2026 regulation decides what a shop must be to renew.

That regulation, published on 30 April 2026, adds four conditions for anyone applying to sell, process or export flower, and applies the same tests on renewal:

• the applicant must own or lawfully occupy the premises, with the owner’s written consent if they do not own them;
• there must be a dedicated storage area of adequate size, kept separate, off the floor, and not mixed with anything else;
• the applicant must either hold a licence to run a health facility, a licence to make or sell herbal products or medicines, a licence to produce Category 5 cannabis or hemp extracts, or a folk-healer certificate — or run a cultivation site that supplies section 46 licensees;
• at least one member of staff trained by the department must be on the premises at all times the shop is open.

Licences issued before it continue until they expire. A licensee who has ever been suspended for breaching the controlled-herb notices is to be considered for non-renewal. The regulation’s own statement of reasons says its purpose is to confine the use of the flower to medical purposes only.

For a buyer this translates into a handful of plain observations. A counter that sells you flower with no prescription is breaking its licence conditions, not creating an offence for you. A delivery app, a website or a vending machine selling flower is outside what any licence allows. A shop inside a temple compound, a dormitory, a public park, a zoo or an amusement park should not be selling at all. And a “hemp flower” label does not take a product outside the notice, which covers the whole genus.

Growing a plant at home

Neither the 2025 notice nor either licensing regulation says anything about a plant grown at home for your own use, and we found no instrument in force that regulates it. We are not treating that silence as a permission, and it does not extend to selling, giving away for trade or processing what you grow for trade — which is exactly what section 46 licenses. The cabinet’s bill, by the minister’s account, would require cultivation plots to be registered.

What is coming, and what is only being argued about

On 22 September 2026 the cabinet approved a draft Cannabis Control Bill. The Minister of Public Health said it would restrict cannabis to medical use on a doctor’s prescription, require cultivation plots to be registered by size so they can be traced, and carry clearer and heavier penalties than the present Act; he also said that shops would have to become medical facilities with a doctor on site to renew. The bill goes next to the House of Representatives. We have not seen its text, so we print none of its penalties, and nothing in it binds anyone until an Act is published in the Gazette.

Two other things are in circulation and should be kept in their place. In June 2024 the ministry put out for consultation a draft notice that would have put the flower back on the Category 5 list from 1 January 2025; it was never issued, and the 2026 instruments are drafted on the footing that the plant is not a narcotic. And the June 2026 open letter mentioned above asks the minister to do exactly that. It is advocacy. We report it because it confirms where the law currently stands, not because it predicts where it will go.