I don't really do any drugs nor to I imbibe in the prolific use of alcohol. I'm not claiming some sort of moral high ground or anything, I just don't really like to be off my head a lot of the time. If there is a special celebration and everyone is doing it then sure, I'll get involved; but I don't care at all for hangovers nor do I handle them very well so for the most part the use of drugs isn't really something that I ever got into. I get "the fear" after about 5 drinks when I am at a party because I know I am going to pay for it later.
I did, however, celebrate the fact that Thailand legalized recreational marijuana use because come on now, if you can buy enough whiskey to kill blood poison the entire neighborhood in a night, then why would a plant that has never killed anyone not be legal? It never made sense to me.
These days though, I think that Thailand went a bit nuts with the legalization as it is kind of a blemish on what would otherwise be some pretty nice looking areas. That's something I have talked about a bit too much in the past though so I'll just leave that alone for now. Let's just say that no matter where you are and especially if you are in some sort of tourist area, you will experience exactly zero difficulty in legally obtaining weed.
Yet, every now and then some people, mostly foreigners, somehow manage to get arrested for marijuana possession and it just boggles the mind that people would even bother with something like this.
Just as a quick something or other, the image above was taken from an international newspaper article that claimed that "Marijuana is legal but tourists can't smoke" and is complete and utter nonsense. Not only can tourists buy and smoke weed but they are encouraged to do so around every corner.
So the story goes that recently in Phuket a group of 6 people from the UK were arrested for having 6kg of weed in their apartment and while the article doesn't specifically state this, the problem here isn't that they had weed, it is that they had so much of it. When someone has this much marijuana, it is pretty evident that they intend to either smuggle it out of the country or to distribute it in perhaps ways that the legal and licensed shops cannot do such as selling it in clubs or on the beach or something. I have no idea, they don't go into details about it.
They also didn't conceal the identity of the perpetrators but I suppose there isn't much reason to do so since this is basically open and shut.
I understand that people need to make money but is this the way? I mean, the country did the world a solid by being progressive enough to legalize something that honestly should be legal but then someone has to come along and take advantage of it and try to take it to the next level.
If you were coming to visit Thailand and wanted to be high off your face the entire time you were here there would be absolutely nothing and nobody stopping you from doing exactly that. When you run out you just run down to one of the dispensaries of which there are way too many of anyway. It's not like they ever have to close as far as I can tell but then again, I am normally in bed by midnight so hell if I know.
I don't think that these 6 UK citizens are going to do any sort of hard time but it still begs the question of what the hell were they thinking? The owner of the stuff admitted to being the owner but as the report says "couldn't produce a permit for it." I don't know what sort of permit entitles one to have 6kg of weed but if the suspicion is that the people were intending to smuggle this to other parts of the world, I think that is probably a pretty safe assumption.
No good deed goes unpunished, as they say, and when things like this happen it only encourages the politicians that are in the pockets of the alcohol industry to have more fuel for their tirade about how this plant should be made illegal.
At the moment they are also pushing a story about how a student was pressured into smoking weed at school and then went unconscious. Well, that can happen I guess but there are probably a lot of other factors at play.
While I do not use the stuff other than once in a blue moon, I still believe entirely in the fact that it should be legal. We just need jackaloons like these 6 Britons to stop taking the piss.