Does Thailand really want to become a cannabis tourism hotspot?
Earlier this year, Thailand surprised the world by making it legal to buy and sell marijuana, a wildly unexpected move for a country that previously issued harsh jail sentences – up to 15 years - for anyone caught with the drug.
Since then, cannabis stores have sprung up around the country. Ostensibly, you can only buy it for ‘medicinal’ use but seeing as no one is required show any evidence from a doctor, recreational use is booming.
And now, the tourism trade is beginning to jump on board. Last month, The Beach Samui on the island of Koh Samui launched southeast Asia’s first in-hotel ‘herbal dispensary’ where guests can sample “all-natural premium cannabis-infused medicine” designed to “enhance the natural journey of wellbeing”. Elsewhere hotels are selling “weed pizzas” and handing out joints you can smoke beside your resort pools.
The Beach hotel on the island of Koh Samui launched southeast Asia’s first in-hotel ‘herbal dispensary’.
Koh Samui, some reports say, is likely to become Asia’s Amsterdam.
Which is ironic, because at exactly the same time, Amsterdam is making moves to step away from being Europe’s Amsterdam. This week, in an effort to reduce tourist rowdiness, clean up its image as a low-grade tourism destination and make the city more liveable for its own residents, officials in the Dutch capital published a proposal that would ban cannabis smoking in public areas in the city’s famous Red Light District, and ban its sale altogether on weekends.
Amsterdam is going for a bit of a rebrand. Image: iStock
“This is an important step towards discouraging drug use, getting rid of the status of Amsterdam as a drug capital and reclaiming the city centre,” the report read.
It makes you wonder why Thailand is in such a hurry to pick up Amsterdam’s mantle.
I’m no prude when it comes to drug use – ask anyone who knew me in my 20s – but there is something kind of grim, and a bit sad, about travelling to a country specifically to get wasted. It feels disrespectful, as though you have temporary permission to behave badly because you’re in someone else’s country where it doesn’t count.
That’s basically the argument being made in Amsterdam. Residents complain that their city centre is unrecognisable: that tourists flock there to party, behave horribly and overcrowd the city centre with no thought to the people who live there. “What we do not welcome is people who come here on a vacation from morals. They express a form of behaviour they would not express at home,” mayor Femke Halsema told Bloomberg.
"There is something kind of grim, and a bit sad, about travelling to a country specifically to get wasted."
Thailand has long been a country with two faces: on one hand it is a nation of unmatched serenity and beauty, filled with tranquil Buddhist traditions and people known for their grace and friendliness. On the other, there’s its wild tourist side, particularly the red light districts of Patpong and Soi Cowboy in Bangkok, where a largely unregulated sex trade feed tourists’ desires, plus the famously drug-soaked Full Moon Parties on Koh Pha Ngan.
Adding marijuana to this mix is almost certainly going to amp up Thailand’s reputation as somewhere you go just to party. This may be great for tourists – and even for the tourism earnings of the country – but is this really the way Thai people want to live? Do they really want westerners coming to their country and behaving even more boorishly than we’re already known to do?
Perhaps, as marijuana becomes progressively less criminalised all over the world – Australia, for example is looking at a bill to make recreational use legal next year – then cannabis-centred vacations will become less of a novelty. Perhaps it will become part of the fabric of life where we live, rather than something you only do when you’re going wild in someone else’s country.
I hope so. Because Thailand is too beautiful to ruin.
