Why Did We Spend Our Own Money as Cannabis Customers in Thailand?
Before we wrote a word about this market, we spent more than ten thousand dollars of our own money as paying customers across the country. That was not incidental. It was method.
What Is the Gap Between a Shop's Pitch and Its Actual Transaction?
Every shop has a story it tells about itself. What matters for a market estimate is what the shop actually does at the point of sale. Pricing, product, what gets pushed, what moves. The only way to see that reliably is to stand on the customer side of the counter, repeatedly, and watch.
Why Doesn't Participant Observation Scale, and Why Is That Fine?
This is a slow, expensive way to learn a market. It cannot be automated and it cannot be outsourced. That is precisely why the intelligence it produces is hard to replicate, and why it tends to be closer to the truth than anything assembled at a distance.
The patterns that emerged from that participant view sit underneath the numbers in the report.
Because the only reliable way to see what a shop actually does at the point of sale, rather than the story it tells about itself, is to stand on the customer side of the counter repeatedly and watch.
More than ten thousand dollars, spent before a word was written about this market.
Every shop has a story it tells about itself. What matters for a market estimate is what it actually does at the point of sale: pricing, product, what gets pushed, what moves.
It is slow and expensive and cannot be automated or outsourced, which is precisely why the intelligence it produces is hard to replicate and closer to the truth.
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.