Sakon Nakhon ganja growers fret over unsold stock, change in govt policy

Even worse, they were worried about the government relisting cannabis as a drug, which would leave them in limbo.

As the second anniversary of the decriminalisation of ganja approaches on June 9, members of a community enterprise growing marijuana in Sakon Nakhon said that things had not turned out as per their optimistic expectations.

They said when they started growing ganja two years ago after it was decriminalised, their ganja products sold like hot cakes. Ganja leaves fetched them 10,500 baht per kilogram and buyers had to book them months in advance.

They could also sell ganja flowers to the Department of Thai Traditional and Alternative Medicine and a hospital in Sakon Nakhon to use as medicine.

The community also made ganja tea from leaves and branches for sale.

But members of the community enterprise found out that their products last year did not sell well anymore. They said several thousands of kilograms of their unsold ganja leaves had piled up.

They said vendors no longer came to buy their products. Even if they offered to buy, they would lower the price to 1,200 baht a kilogram, the villagers complained.

The members of the enterprise said the price had dropped and locally-grown ganja could not sell because some tycoons had cultivated marijuana in neighbouring countries and smuggled them into the kingdom.

They said some Thai investors also had joined hands with their foreign partners to import foreign strains of ganja to grow and sell at much higher prices at the cost of the villagers who grew the Thai strain to sell.

The villagers called on the government to come up with measures to help the villagers who had grown Thai marijuana instead of supporting foreign investors.

They also called on the authorities to effectively prevent smuggling of ganja from neighbouring countries. The government should scan marijuana products in the market to check whether they were really cultivated in Thailand, they said.

“When the government decriminalised the plant, it promised that farmers would have a better life, but now people have not even recovered their investment in greenhouses,” a villager said, asking not to be named.

The members of the community enterprise said they disagreed with the government’s plan to relist marijuana as a drug, saying it would not really solve the issue and it would be a political game.

Meanwhile, Public Health Minister Somsak Thepsuthin said the government planned to relist marijuana as a drug as the number of youth smoking marijuana had increased by 10 times during  the past two years.

He said researchers at Chulalongkorn University had also found out that the IQ points of youth who smoked ganja had dropped by 8-9 points.

Somsak said the Public Health Ministry also had its own figures about the side-effects of ganja smoking, but the data would not be released now.

“I would like to see the Public Health Ministry remain neutral in this issue,” Somsak said.

Somsak also advised those who had received permission to plant marijuana for sale, to stop planting new crops pending clarification of the government’s policy on the issue.