How Big Is the Thailand Cannabis Market, Really?
The honest answer is that the Thailand cannabis market is materially smaller than the multi-billion-dollar forecasts still in circulation, and also not the collapsed ruin the closure headlines imply. The real figure sits between those two stories, and reaching it requires counting the market from the ground rather than extrapolating from boom-era assumptions. That number, and how it was built, is the core of our report rather than something to give away in a blog.
Why the headline forecasts mislead
The widely quoted forecasts were built by projecting the boom forward, using growth assumptions from before the June 2025 recriminalization. When the market contracted, those projections did not; they kept compounding a reality that no longer exists. The result is figures far above what the market actually supports today.
Why the collapse story also misleads
The opposite error is reading the shop closures as the whole story. Thousands of shops closed, but demand concentrated into survivors and continued through grey channels. Sizing the market only by what officially closed undercounts what actually persists. Both the boom forecast and the collapse narrative miss the real, middle figure.
How you actually size it
Getting a real number means measuring the market as it is: counting shops, observing what sells, tracing supply including the grey channel, and reconciling the legal retail market with the supply that feeds it. That is slow, ground-level work, and it is the opposite of extrapolation. It is also the only way to produce a figure you can defend.
Smaller than the headline forecasts, but not collapsed. The real figure requires ground-level measurement.
They extrapolate pre-contraction growth.
Demand concentrated into survivors and grey channels.
By counting and tracing the market, not extrapolating.
This post gives you the argument. The full method, the figures, and the confidence ratings behind them are in the report. Read a free sample chapter, then decide.
Read the free sample →Three findings from the 2026 edition, free.
Of 8,636 expired dispensary licences, 1,339 renewed. The rest did not bother. That is not a market collapsing. That is a market taking out its own trash.
CertainFewer shops, higher revenue each. The closures removed storefronts, not revenue, because the shops that closed were earning almost nothing. Every desk model read the count and stopped.
LikelyA small minority of shops earn a disproportionate share of all revenue. The bottom half earns a fraction of it. Nobody else has measured this.
LikelyBuilt from 850+ dispensary visits across Thailand, 100+ dispensary owner and operator interviews, 30+ farm owner and operator interviews, and 400+ customer interviews across 40 nationalities. 101 pages. 23 chapters. Every chapter sourced, every figure confidence-tagged.