Thailand did not put cannabis back on the narcotics list

In June 2025 Thailand made a Ministry of Public Health notification about cannabis, and almost every account of it says the country recriminalised the plant or returned it to medical use only. Neither is what the instrument does. Cannabis flower has been a controlled herb rather than a narcotic since 2022, and it still is. What June 2025 changed is who a licence holder may sell it to.

There have been five states in four years and two different Acts are involved, which is why so few accounts have it right. What follows is each state with the instrument that created it, read from the Royal Gazette texts rather than from reporting about them.

What the law was, state by state

Every Thai sentence above is cut out of the cached gazette file at build time. The English is a translation and is not official. Dates in the Buddhist era are converted by subtracting 543, so B.E. 2568 is 2025.

The mechanism, which is where most accounts go wrong

Two instruments govern two different things, and they are made under two different statutes. Conflating them is the single error that produces almost every wrong description of Thai cannabis law.

The narcotics side. The notification specifying Category 5 narcotics is made under the Narcotics Code, and it is short. Its operative clause lists three things: the opium poppy, Psilocybe cubensis, and cannabis extracts. The plant is not on it and neither is the flower.

อาศัยอำนาจตามความในมาตรา ๒๙ วรรคสอง แห่งประมวลกฎหมายยาเสพติด

Translation, marked as a translation: By virtue of section 29 paragraph two of the Narcotics Code.

สารสกัดจากทุกส่วนของพืชกัญชาหรือกัญชง ซึ่งเป็นพืชในสกุล Cannabis ยกเว้นสารสกัดดังต่อไปนี้

Translation, marked as a translation: Extracts from every part of the cannabis or hemp plant, being plants of the genus Cannabis, except the following extracts.

The two exceptions to that extract entry both turn on domestic cultivation, so an imported extract does not qualify on its strength alone. That is the whole of cannabis in the narcotics schedule.

The traditional medicine side. What makes cannabis flower controlled is a different instrument entirely, made under a traditional medicine statute, and it says so in its own opening words.

มาตรา ๔ วรรคหนึ่ง มาตรา ๔๔ และมาตรา ๔๕ (๓) (๔) (๕) และ (๖) แห่งพระราชบัญญัติคุ้มครองและส่งเสริมภูมิปัญญาการแพทย์แผนไทย พ.ศ. ๒๕๔๒

Translation, marked as a translation: Section 4 paragraph one, section 44, and section 45(3), (4), (5) and (6) of the Protection and Promotion of Thai Traditional Medicine Knowledge Act, B.E. 2542.

A controlled herb under a traditional medicine Act is not a narcotic under the Narcotics Code. They are separate regimes with separate licences, separate conditions and separate penalties. A source that says cannabis flower is a Category 5 narcotic has read one schedule into the other.

What June 2025 actually changed

The notification was given on 23 June 2025, published in the Royal Gazette on 25 June 2025, and comes into force the day after publication, so 26 June 2025.

ประกาศ ณ วันที่ ๒๓ มิถุนายน พ.ศ. ๒๕๖๘

Translation, marked as a translation: Given on 23 June B.E. 2568.

ประกาศนี้ให้ใช้บังคับตั้งแต่วันถัดจากวันประกาศในราชกิจจานุเบกษาเป็นต้นไป

Translation, marked as a translation: This notification comes into force from the day following the day of its publication in the Royal Gazette.

It repeals the November 2022 notification and keeps that notification’s designation word for word. The flower, and only the flower.

ให้กัญชา ซึ่งเป็นพืชในสกุล Cannabis วงศ์ Cannabaceae เฉพาะส่วนของช่อดอก เป็นสมุนไพรควบคุม

Translation, marked as a translation: Cannabis, a plant of the genus Cannabis in the family Cannabaceae, only the part that is the flower, is a controlled herb.

What is new is the trade. A licence holder may sell the controlled herb only to another holder of a section 46 licence.

ให้กับผู้รับใบอนุญาตตามมาตรา ๔๖ เท่านั้น

Translation, marked as a translation: To a holder of a licence under section 46 only.

Supply to a person runs instead through a dispensing order written by a practitioner, and the notification caps it.

เป็นการเฉพาะที่ใช้ได้ไม่เกินสามสิบวัน

Translation, marked as a translation: Specifically, not exceeding thirty days of use.

A foreign medical cannabis card carries no weight in this instrument. Each practitioner the notification lists is defined by reference to a named Thai professional Act: the law on the medical profession, the law on Thai traditional medicine, the law on the practice of the art of healing, the law on the dental profession, the law on the veterinary profession. No foreign document appears anywhere in it. That is an absence rather than a prohibition, and this page states it as one: what makes supply lawful is a dispensing order from a practitioner licensed in Thailand.

Two conditions from 2022 are not in the 2025 list. The November 2022 notification carried an express prohibition on selling to anyone under twenty, to a pregnant woman or to a breastfeeding woman, and a second on selling to school pupils or students. Both are quoted in the table above. The 2025 conditions do not repeat them, and route supply to a person through a dispensing order instead. It does not follow that selling to a minor became permitted. What else governs that was not read here, and this page draws no conclusion from the omission beyond stating it.

Our own entry was wrong, in four ways

This project published a Thailand cannabis entry on 25 June 2026. It was written from https://permitfortraveler.fda.moph.go.th, a government traveller permit portal, rather than from the Royal Gazette. It read:

Category 5 — cannabis reverted to medical-only (2025); importing cannabis products is prohibited (Narcotics Code B.E. 2564)

Documentation field, in full: None — importing cannabis products is prohibited.

That is one entry, not thirty four, and the honest thing is to say so: this is a smaller failure than the one the sibling report describes. It is worth printing because of how it failed rather than how often.

The third of those is the one worth carrying away. Dating a state to the newest instrument you happen to find is how four of the five rows in the first table get collapsed into one. The flower only designation is from November 2022. The 2025 notification replaced a controlled herb regime. It did not create one.

It is corrected. The live entry now names the traditional medicine Act, states that cannabis was not returned to the Category 5 list, and quotes the notification for it. The check above is a match on one phrase, so it reports entries that carry the correction rather than entries that are right for every other reason. Thailand has 50 confirmed substance entries in total, and this report examined one of them.

How current this is, and the part that cannot be settled from text

Everything up to 26 June 2025 is settled by the three cached instruments, because each of the later two repeals the earlier one by name and by date. Everything before 26 June 2025 is settled by the three cached instruments, because each of the later two repeals the earlier one by name and date. What no primary text here can settle is whether a further notification has been made since.

This page is current as of 16 September 2026, and that is a weaker claim than saying it is current. The window it cannot close from primary text runs from 26 June 2025 to 16 September 2026. The Ministry of Public Health cannabis law index at cannabisinfo.fda.moph.go.th was fetched on the date above. It lists the 2565 Category 5 notification as current and shows no amendment to it. That index does not list the June 2025 notification at all, which is evidence about the index rather than about the law, so its silence is not relied on here.

How these texts were read, including where the reading was hard

Three gazette PDFs were cached and hashed. Two of them give up their Thai body text to an ordinary extraction once two systematic defects are corrected: tone marks arrive as private use codepoints, and the vowel sara am arrives stripped of its nikhahit, so a word like อำนาจ extracts as อ านาจ.

The third does not, and saying so is more useful than hiding it. The June 2025 file carries a broken character map, so its Thai body extracts as a substitution on glyph identifiers while its gazette header, set in a different font, extracts perfectly. Rather than transcribe that body by eye and ask a reader to trust the transcription, the generator derives the substitution from 5 aligned pairs and then proves each quotation by encoding it and finding the result in the file. The map is many to one, so it is used only in that direction and never to decode.

A matcher shown only true strings has not been tested, so it is also shown false ones. The build runs 7 phrases that must be found and 15 near misses that must not be, and a near miss that matches fails the build exactly as a real quotation that does not. They are deliberately close: the 23rd of June against the 25th, section 45 against section 46, the leaf against the flower. All 22 held when this page was built.

Attribution

Royal Gazette texts are published by the Office of the Council of State and the Royal Gazette office.

• ratchakitcha.soc.go.th. Carries the Royal Gazette originals for the 2565 instruments.
• dtam.moph.go.th. Carries the 2568 instrument, on the Department of Thai Traditional and Alternative Medicine site.

What this page does not claim

• How the conditions in any of these notifications are enforced in practice. Nothing here is a statement about policing, prosecution, or what a shop in Bangkok is actually doing.
• Whether any further notification has moved this since 26 June 2025. The page states the date it was checked and what was checked, and that is a weaker claim than currency.
• What the 16 June 2022 notification said. That instrument is not cached and only its repeal is quoted.
• Anything about import. Bringing cannabis into Thailand is governed by instruments that were not read here, and the page says nothing about it either way.
• That a foreign medical cannabis card is unlawful. The notification gives supply a route through a dispensing order written by a practitioner licensed under named Thai professional Acts, and no foreign document appears anywhere in it. That is an absence, and it is stated as one.

The first of those is the one readers will want most. This page says what the instruments say. It does not say how any of it is enforced. A notification and a street are different subjects, and nothing here was read about the second.

How to cite this

Cite the gazette, not us, wherever you can. All three instruments are linked in the table above and all of them will outlive this page. Where you need to cite the reading itself:

2CB.com, Thailand did not put cannabis back on the narcotics list, https://2cb.com/reports/thailand-cannabis, accessed [date].

Corrections are welcome and are checked against the source rather than defended. stephen@2cb.com.

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