Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Cannabis yet again on this channel. It's kind of a hot button issue at the moment, the issue of cannabis and what's going to be happening in the political space with respect to this. I thought of making this video, I have recently been rereading a book, it is called the Fifth Tiger, a Study of Thai Development Policy by Robert J. Muscat, I will go ahead and throw that up on screen but yeah, again the Fifth Tiger here, I have had this book for a little while. By the way I bought this book from Canterbury Tales which is a shop down in Pattaya that sells like used books and they are a pretty good little shop if you want to get English language books. They used to be over on Soi Chaiyaphum sometimes called Soi Pothole over near Soi Buakhao, I believe they have moved. I haven't actually been to the new place, I got this some years back, I read it and I am sort of rereading it or just kind of going through it again because I felt like doing it. 

I came upon this excerpt from this book, I am going to go ahead and quote because when I read it I thought 'man that just seems to pertain to cannabis right now.' Quoting directly: "The principal theories of international trade describe the effects and gains from trade as arising out of the reallocation of domestic factors of production within each trading partner economy as each responds to the opportunities to focus on its own products of comparative advantage in production costs. The vent for surplus concept and contrast describes the process in which an agricultural region with underemployed land and labour applies these underemployed factors to expand production for export without necessarily any change in technology or reallocation of factors in favour of a changed product mix."  When I read that I thought there is sort of a notion in strategy or game theory called "first mover advantage", when you make the first move. There is that old saying like in real estate and things, "be first, be smarter or cheap". This is kind of where I think Thailand finds itself at the moment in terms of international trade, in terms of international business when it comes to the issue of Cannabis.

Cannabis, again I have said it before and I will say it again, there were things I agreed and disagreed with in the last Government but Cannabis was something that I thought they were very farsighted on. They saw that "hey this is an agricultural product, it is like agribusiness," what we call agribusiness back in the United States and also by being the first out there to do this, Thailand's Cannabis industry could be way further ahead than other jurisdictions with regard to the possibility of exports and things down the road. So this was something Thailand was really on board with or I shouldn't say on board with, Thailand was really ahead of the game on with respect to sort of looking at this in the sense of kind of like in the sense of Geo-economics.

My hope is and as I have said in other videos, yeah regulation, absolutely necessary but not re-criminalization because again Thailand has managed to find herself in a position where she could have tremendous comparative advantage in the long term in terms of economics, in terms of her relative position to other countries in the Cannabis space.