Thailand’s four-year experiment with open cannabis sales is being written out of the law books. On 22 September 2026 the Cabinet approved a Cannabis Control Act that limits the plant and its extracts to medical treatment and research, adds three-year licences for everyone who grows, makes, imports, exports or sells it, and gives the country’s remaining shops until 2028 to become medical facilities or close. The vote does not make the bill law yet, but it marks the point where a policy the government has been talking about since 2023 finally has a text, a timetable and a minister willing to say the word “recreation” only to rule it out.
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The approval was announced by Public Health Minister Pattana Promphat and reported by Forbes on 23 September, with the fullest account of the bill’s provisions published by the Bangkok Post. This article brings together what the bill says, what it changes compared with the rules already in force, and the closure figures that show how far the market had already shrunk before the Cabinet acted.
Key Takeaways
The Cannabis Control Act approved by Thailand’s Cabinet on 22 September 2026 restricts cannabis and cannabis extracts to medical treatment by health professionals and to authorised research, and bans recreational use outright. Cultivation, production, import, export and sale of flowers and extracts will need three-year licences issued by the Department of Thai Traditional and Alternative Medicine, while roots, stems, branches, leaves and seeds sold for medical purposes will not. Sales to anyone under 20 and to pregnant or breastfeeding women are prohibited, advertising is banned, and illegal production, import, export and sale carry criminal penalties, whereas people who misuse cannabis face fines only. Existing shops can trade on their current licences until those expire, the last of them in 2028, after which only premises that qualify as medical facilities can renew. The bill still has to pass the House of Representatives. It lands on a market that had already lost more than 7,000 outlets by the end of 2025, when only 15.5% of expiring licences were renewed and the number of active premises fell from 18,433 to 11,136. Since June 2026, DTAM guidelines have set 30- and 90-day licence suspensions for rule breaches and immediate revocation for sales to minors, on-site smoking or online sales.
What the Thailand cannabis medical use only bill actually says
The Bangkok Post describes the bill as Thailand’s third attempt to pass a definitive cannabis law since the country removed the plant from its narcotics list in June 2022. The two earlier attempts, one from the Bhumjaithai Party and one from Pheu Thai, stalled before either became law. This version comes from the Ministry of Public Health and, according to Minister Pattana, was built on a regulatory impact assessment and a round of public hearings. Its guiding principle, in his words, is that cannabis must serve medicinal and health interests, not recreation.
In practical terms the bill does five things. It defines the only lawful uses of cannabis and its extracts as medical treatment under a health professional and legally authorised research. It creates a licensing system with three-year permits. It sets out who may not be sold cannabis. It bans advertising, including the promotion of cannabis use and of paraphernalia. And it writes a schedule of criminal penalties and fines for illegal production, import, export and sale, while people who simply misuse cannabis are subject to fines rather than prison.
The bill also creates a national cannabis committee, chaired by the public health minister, to set policy and supporting measures. Day-to-day licensing sits with the director-general of the Department of Thai Traditional and Alternative Medicine, the same agency that has been running the inspection regime for shops since the crackdown began in 2025.
Three-year licences and the parts of the plant that stay unlicensed
The licensing rule is the mechanical heart of the bill. Anyone who wants to cultivate, produce, import, export or sell cannabis flowers or cannabis extracts will need a licence, and that licence will run for three years before it has to be renewed. Growers must register the location and size of their plots, which the ministry describes as small, medium or large, so that officials can trace cannabis from the field through processing to the point of sale.
There is a carve-out that matters for traditional medicine practitioners and for the hemp side of the industry. Roots, stems, branches, leaves and seeds can be sold without a licence if they are intended for medical treatment. The distinction follows the same logic Thailand used in 2022, when it was the flower and the extract, the parts that carry meaningful THC, that were the focus of concern, not the fibrous parts of the plant.
The Forbes report notes that more than 10,000 shops and cultivation sites have already been entered into a government tracking system, and that the minister said any premises outside that system should be presumed to be operating illegally. Nation Thailand puts the tracked share at over 95% of existing operations, which suggests the registration step will be less of a shock than the licensing criteria themselves.
Who can buy, who can sell, and what happens to advertising
Under the bill, cannabis and its extracts can be dispensed to adults aged 20 and over for medical treatment by licensed practitioners, or used for research. The Bangkok Post adds two prohibited groups: anyone younger than 20 and women who are pregnant or breastfeeding. The prescription requirement is not new in itself. A ministerial regulation issued in 2025 already required a prescription for purchases and confined sales to licensed medical premises. What the bill does is lift that requirement from a ministerial rule, which a future minister could rewrite, into an Act of Parliament.
The advertising ban is broad. It covers not only cannabis products but the promotion of cannabis use and of paraphernalia. For a country whose tourist districts were, until recently, lined with neon leaves and street-level menus, this is the provision that will most visibly change the look of Bangkok, Phuket and Pattaya.
The penalty structure draws a line between supply and use. Illegal production, import, export and sale carry criminal penalties and fines. Personal misuse carries fines only. Thailand is therefore not returning cannabis to the narcotics list, where possession alone could mean prison. It is building a medical-only regime with criminal teeth aimed at the supply chain rather than the individual.
The 2028 deadline for the shops that are still open
The bill does not shut existing shops on the day it passes. Licences already issued remain valid until they expire. Because shop licences run for three years and were issued in waves after 2022, the expiry dates fall across 2026, 2027 and 2028. When a licence runs out, a shop that is not a medical facility cannot renew it. To qualify, a premises needs licensed medical staff on site and has to meet the storage, odour-control and smoke-elimination standards introduced in the 2025 regulation.
Minister Pattana has been candid about how many will make it. Earlier in 2026 he estimated that of roughly 11,000 dispensaries, only around 2,000 would meet the requirements to operate as clinics within three years, according to The Globe. Nation Thailand quotes him saying that more than half of the current shops would need to convert into medical facilities to renew. Either way, the ministry expects the number of legal cannabis premises to fall sharply again between now and 2028, and it says inspections will be stepped up in the meantime.
This is a very different trajectory from the one adult-use markets elsewhere are on. In the same year that Thailand is engineering its retail sector downwards, New York reported record licensed cannabis sales for 2025. And in Europe, the first large survey of cannabis use in Germany after partial legalisation is measuring what happens when a country moves in the opposite direction.
The 7,000 closures: the numbers from late 2025
The bill arrives on a market that had already contracted. As of late December 2025, Public Health Ministry figures reported by The Straits Times and summarised in an earlier Forbes analysis showed that out of 8,636 licences that expired during 2025, only 1,339 businesses, or 15.5%, applied for and received renewal. The remaining 7,297 shops left the market. Thailand had recorded 18,433 cannabis outlets nationwide at the end of 2025; after those closures, an estimated 11,136 establishments remained, with thousands more facing licence expiry in 2026 and 2027.
Those closures were driven not by the bill approved this week, which did not yet exist, but by the ministerial regulation the Cabinet approved in late 2025. That regulation governed the study, export, sale and processing of cannabis as a “controlled herb”, replaced rules dating from 2016, and required that sales take place only in legally designated facilities such as hospitals, pharmacies and traditional medicine clinics, with doctors or authorised personnel responsible for dispensing. To obtain or renew a licence, businesses had to show effective odour and smoke elimination systems and meet strict storage standards to prevent contamination.
The two instruments are worth keeping apart. The 2025 regulation is what emptied the shop fronts. The 2026 bill is what would make the emptying permanent, because a ministerial regulation can be reversed by the next minister and an Act cannot be reversed without Parliament.
How the Rules Are Enforced Now: Suspensions and Revocations
The 2025 regulation came with an enforcement manual. On 22 June 2026 the Department of Thai Traditional and Alternative Medicine (DTAM) published uniform penalty guidelines for every licence holder that researches, exports, sells or commercially processes cannabis, so that inspectors in different provinces apply the same rules.
Minor breaches mean a 30-day licence suspension: missing or incomplete inventory and sales reports, failing to display the licence or to show the electronic version during an inspection, commercial advertising, and growing or exporting cannabis that does not meet Good Agricultural and Collection Practices (GACP) standards. Selling without a prescription, or failing to report export details, brings 90 days. Several breaches found in one inspection are added together, but the total cannot exceed 90 days, and repeating the same offence after a suspension can lead straight to revocation.
Some breaches skip suspension altogether. According to DTAM deputy director-general Thewan Thanirat, licences are revoked for filing false reports, selling to people under 20, students or pregnant and breastfeeding women, allowing smoking on the premises, selling through vending machines or online, and trading in temples, public parks or student dormitories. The rules are already being used: in September, 35 licences were revoked and 112 suspended in Phuket alone, according to The Thaiger.
From decriminalisation in 2022 to reversal: how Thailand got here
Thailand legalised medical cannabis in 2018 and was the first country in Southeast Asia to do so. In June 2022 it went further and removed cannabis from the narcotics list altogether, again a first for the region. The move was championed by Anutin Charnvirakul, then health minister and now prime minister, and by his Bhumjaithai Party, which had campaigned on it before the 2019 election.
What followed is the part every subsequent government has described as a mistake. Decriminalisation came without a law to regulate cultivation, production or sale, and thousands of shops opened in the gap. In the first year the industry generated an estimated 28 billion baht, about $865 million, according to Nikkei Asia estimates cited by Forbes. That figure is an estimate rather than an audited number, and it covers a market that was never formally taxed or measured, so it should be read as an order of magnitude rather than a precise total.
The public mood turned with it. By early 2026, reporting by The Japan Times described a broad backlash against youth access, with doctors and addiction specialists warning of more hospital admissions among people under 25 and surveys cited in that reporting estimating that recreational users had risen from about 1.2 million in 2020 to more than 11 million in 2022. The boom also did less for business owners than promised: only about a quarter of surveyed cannabis companies were reported to be profitable. Ahead of the February 2026 general election, the major parties, including those that had championed the green rush, distanced themselves from recreational use.
Governments after 2022 promised to reinstate tighter controls and confine cannabis to medical use. The crackdown became visible in 2025, when the ministerial regulation was issued and licence renewals collapsed. The Bhumjaithai Party, which had opened the door, has since backed closing it. The Cabinet approval of 22 September 2026 is the moment the reversal moves from ministerial rule-making to primary legislation.
The pattern of a rapid opening followed by a legislative retreat is not unique to Thailand. In South Asia, the Gandaki province cannabis law in Nepal shows a regional government trying to write the rules before the market opens rather than after, arguably the lesson Thailand’s experience teaches.
What the bill does not change
The bill does not close the door on medical cannabis. Thailand remains the only country in Southeast Asia where medical cannabis is legal, and the government continues to describe it as a driver of growth in healthcare and medical research. The Forbes report from April 2026 noted that authorities are backing investment in processing facilities that meet international food and industrial safety standards, with domestic healthcare demand taking priority over export.
Patient access is the other constant. When the 2025 regulation was announced, the ministry assured the public that access to cannabis for treatment would not be interrupted. Minister Pattana said patients who use cannabis for treatment would not face shortages, and that hospitals nationwide were staffed with licensed personnel ready to meet demand. Nothing in the September 2026 bill contradicts that. The prescription-only model it enshrines is closer to the one operating in the United Kingdom, where medical cannabis prescriptions passed 1.7 million almost entirely through private clinics, than to the retail model Thailand is leaving behind.
Where the numbers and the timeline are still soft
A few cautions are in order. The bill has been approved by the Cabinet, not by Parliament. It goes next to the House of Representatives, and the two previous attempts at a cannabis law died before they reached the statute book. The provisions described here are those of the draft as reported by Thai media on 22 and 23 September 2026 and may change in committee.
The closure figures come from the Public Health Ministry and have not been independently audited. They count licences and premises, not businesses, so a single operator with several shops appears several times. The 28 billion baht revenue estimate for the first year is a journalistic estimate of an untaxed market. And the minister’s projection that only around 2,000 of roughly 11,000 shops will qualify as clinics is a forecast, not a count.
Finally, the picture of who was actually using cannabis in Thailand during the open-market years is thin. Thailand has not published the kind of population survey that, for example, the LENAD III study of cannabis use in Brazil provides, so claims about the health effects of decriminalisation, in either direction, rest on limited evidence.
FAQ
Not yet in law. The Cabinet approved a bill on 22 September 2026 that would restrict cannabis and its extracts to medical treatment and research and prohibit recreational use. The bill still has to pass the House of Representatives. In the meantime, a 2025 ministerial regulation already requires a prescription for purchases and limits sales to licensed medical premises.
Shops with a valid licence can continue trading until that licence expires. Licences run for three years and the last of the current batch expires in 2028. After expiry, only premises that qualify as medical facilities with licensed health staff on site can renew. The Public Health Minister has estimated that only around 2,000 of roughly 11,000 shops are likely to meet that standard.
Under the rules already in force, cannabis can only be sold at licensed medical premises to a person with a prescription, and the new bill would make that a statutory requirement with criminal penalties for unlicensed sale and fines for misuse. Sales to anyone under 20 are prohibited. Travellers should assume that buying cannabis without a prescription, or from a shop outside the government tracking system, is not lawful, and should check current Thai regulations before their trip rather than relying on the situation as it was in 2022 or 2023.
The 2025 measure was a ministerial regulation that reclassified cannabis as a controlled herb, required prescriptions and set standards for shops. It could be changed by a future minister. The 2026 bill is a Cannabis Control Act that would put the medical-only rule, the licensing system, the advertising ban and the penalties into primary legislation, which only Parliament can amend.
Legal Disclaimer
This article is provided for informational and journalistic purposes only. It describes a draft law approved by Thailand’s Cabinet as reported by Thai and international media in September 2026, together with official figures on shop closures, and it does not constitute legal advice. The bill has not been enacted and its provisions may change during parliamentary consideration. Cannabis laws in Thailand and in the reader’s own country of residence or travel can change quickly and may differ from what is described here. Anyone with questions about their legal position, whether as a business operator, a patient or a visitor, should consult a qualified lawyer or the relevant Thai authorities. Nothing in this article should be read as encouraging the purchase, possession or use of cannabis.
