Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are posing the question, will Cannabis Policy kill Thailand's real estate sector? I talked about this going back about what 2, 3 years ago, it was actually 3 years ago going back into 2022, in roughly the 90 days after then Public Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul pulled Cannabis from the Thai narcotics list and effectively made Cannabis legal - not effectively - did make cannabis legal for even "recreational" use here in the Kingdom of Thailand. Basically, I started to notice that there was an upshot to this policy that nobody I think had really thought about then and clearly nobody is thinking about now, and that was these Cannabis shops take up a number of retail commercial spaces and they take them up in such a way that it actually brightens the landscape from a real estate perspective.

Now I know there are those about that don't like Cannabis, they have problems with it especially being smoked in public. I have problems with it being smoked in public; I've done the videos on that. I am a little bit, frankly especially under this Core Coalition Party Government, angry a little bit with Thai Law enforcement for not actually enforcing the laws we have on the books; I did the videos in the past. Thai Police could have been arresting people or detaining them or telling them to stop smoking Cannabis in public based on current Nuisance Laws. That was possible but it didn't seem like that was the priority. It was just somebody or some body, by "body" I mean committee something, somewhere in the political structure, just decided they didn't like this and decided that they were just by God, going to make it illegal again, which I have already made the videos. So we are going to illegalize 18,000 previously legitimate businesses, we are going to destroy those businesses, we are going to destroy those people's jobs, we are going to destroy those people's livelihoods, especially those who detrimentally relied on the law as it was to create those businesses. I've already made the video on that. 

But another consequence of this is, as all those businesses start to shutter, what's going to fill up the commercial real estate space? I don't know if Thai policy makers have been looking around the world, but since COVID, commercial real estate has been in the toilet. There are all kinds of problems in the West dealing with both commercial, like office space, as well as commercial retail real estate space. Why? Because smartphones and digitization are resulting in, frankly businesses don't need real estate to the same degree that they needed it in the past. 

And what's happening? It's tanking the real estate market. One saving grace, major saving grace that I don't think people saw about Cannabis and will see with acute focus moving forward, especially if these businesses start to close down, is that the real estate sector, we're going to start seeing stuff shuttering up and when we start seeing it, what is the cityscape going to look like to tourists in Thailand if every third door is boarded up? It's going to look like a ghost town. We might as well have tumbleweed going down the street, okay? 

The fact of the matter is Cannabis had a number of positive implications for the Thai economy, not least of which it created a bunch of small businesses, created an entirely new cash crop for Thailand, an entirely new industry. It also had this effect on the real estate sector at a time when it needed it most. When the rest of the world's real estate sectors were going negative, Thailand's was just kind of ticking along, if not going a little upwards. That was a major positive trend to Thailand and I really have to question both the competence or the motives of this Government for just unilaterally saying overnight, "all of this is illegal", and I don't even think they have the legal authority to do it because they are completely at odds with what is called the Doctrine of Codification under principles of the Civil Law, which I have gotten into in other videos. Beyond even that, because of this arbitrary and capricious move, we are now going to see all these different places boarded up. I think it is going to end up being a blight on the real estate sector and cause a negative feedback loop that could cause the real estate sector to do even worse moving forward. And if you want anybody to blame, point fingers directly at what can only be called the Rump Coalition, currently as of the time of this video sitting there in their position telling us all, "oh we just say so; you can't do this anymore", and closing everybody down.