When Thailand became the first country (I think) to completely legalize marijuana for whatever the hell you want to do with it I was happy for them. I thought it was a sensible decision and am hopeful that other countries will follow suit. I can see absolutely no reason for this product to be illegal when booze is legal. The people I know that are weed-heads are much more docile and responsible than the drunks that I know and I can't think of anyone that caused a horrible accident because they were too stoned. I'm sure it's happened but I would bet they slowly drove into a ditch rather than crashed head on into a bus because they were trying to replicate a Formula-1 race the recently watched.
I'm glad that you can buy weed just because you feel like it but Thailand, as I kind of expected went a bit nuts with it because it is available literally everywhere.
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No matter where you go in Thailand there are weed shops all over the place. This is most evident in tourist areas where it seems there is a kiosk or shop every 20 meters or so. There are so many shops in fact that one could easily say that the market is well and truly flooded to the point where I don't think most of these shops are actually making any money. There are just too many of them. Just like the multitude of coffee shops that are all the same, it simply isn't possible for people to make any money if there are 15 shops where the market can only support 1 or 2 of them. Combine this with the fact that every one of these shops sells essentially the same gear and you have a situations where there really isn't any commercially viable reason for there to be so many of them.
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It's gotten to the point where a lot of these shops aren't even shops at all. You can see in the above picture where a 7-11 simply rented out a portion of their stairs for a little booth in Phuket and I really feel bad for the poor girl that is working in there. Imagine having to sit on the hard stairs of a 7-11 for 8 hours in a row. Urgh! I bet she uses her phone an awful lot throughout the night.
There are tons of shops, kiosks, booths, and now most of the bars have a few jars here and there that they are also selling by the gram. It seems as though almost every single bar that I go to has at least some level of marijuana for sale inside of it. I'm not complaining because I knew this was going to happen. It just doesn't seem very special anymore now that it is available literally everywhere. At the same time though, alcohol, which serves a similar desire, is just as universally available so I guess it is kind of the same thing.
Here's the kicker though: You are not actually allowed to smoke the weed that you buy in these bars, inside the bars that you buy them in. In fact, you are not supposed to be smoking weed in public at all. Which of course is for the most part completely unenforceable and I regularly see people roll up a joint and smoke it inside of bars that they are in. I have never heard of anyone getting busted for doing this although I am sure it happens here and there.
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I don't know if this has become another reason for people to come on a tourist holiday here but I suppose it would appeal to some people. I don't get high all that often so it hasn't really been a draw for me. Also, some of the people that I know that are regular weed smokers are actually not happy about the legalization because according to them, it has actually made the overall price of weed go UP. I was surprised to hear that but I would imagine this has a lot to do with taxes being added to the buds whereas when it was straight up illegal, there were no taxes involved. This has been true mostly for the people that I know that smoke very low quality weed and do it on and off all day long.
So I still congratulate Thailand on doing something sensible that I wish the rest of the world would follow and this situation will likely sort itself out over time. You'll notice it if you ever visit here. There must be thousands of weed shops that opened up this year and I would imagine that most of them will go out of business.
That poor woman sitting in the box on the steps of 7-11 probably wouldn't be all that disappointed about that. Maybe her next job will have an actual comfortable chair where her legs don't have to swing off the sides for her to sit in.