What Does Three Years of Fieldwork Actually Capture?
850 dispensaries. 30 farms. 100 operators. 400 customers. Three years. The scale is not there to impress. It is the price of answering one question honestly in a market where no authority publishes the basics.
Why Does the Sample Size Have to Be This Large?
A handful of visits gives you anecdotes. A large, deliberate sample across regions and shop types gives you a distribution, and a distribution is what lets you tell the typical from the exceptional. In a market this varied, a small sample does not just risk error. It practically guarantees it.
What Question Sat Underneath Every Visit and Interview?
Every visit and interview fed one question. What is actually happening here, underneath the headlines and the hype? The answer is neither the collapse the obituaries described nor the boom the early forecasts promised. It is more specific than either, and far more useful to anyone making a decision with real money.
That specific picture, quantified and rated, is what the report sets out.
850 dispensaries, 30 farms, 100 operators, and 400 customers worth of ground-level observation in a market where no authority publishes the basics.
A handful of visits gives anecdotes. A large, deliberate sample across regions and shop types gives a distribution, which is what lets you tell the typical from the exceptional.
What is actually happening here, underneath the headlines and the hype, which turned out to be neither the collapse the obituaries described nor the boom the early forecasts promised.
No. In a market this varied, a small sample does not just risk error. It practically guarantees it.
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.