When every cannabis licence in Thailand has to be renewed, and the test it has to pass

Thailand Cannabis Report, 2026 Edition. Volume I: The report

3. The rules in force

Every shop licence in force at the cutoff is re-tested by 31 December 2028, and the test already exists.

3.1 Four regime periods since 2019, and the current one rests on instruments already in force

The four regime periods carry the names used throughout the report: Medical by licence, Open retail, Prescription regime and Post-bill, which begins on the bill's in-force date, and section 4 treats that date as three scenarios rather than one. Exhibit 3.1 draws the dated sequence from the 2022 de-scheduling to the Cabinet's approval in principle of a draft Cannabis Control Act on 22 September 2026, and it is the only place in this volume where each instrument's full date record appears.

What a lawful flower sale rests on today is six instruments and one licence, and none of them is the bill. The licence is the controlled-herb sale licence under the Protection and Promotion of Thai Traditional Medicine Wisdom Act B.E. 2542 (1999), which also supplies the suspension, revocation and inspection powers used on cannabis since 17 June 2022. Under the Notification on Controlled Herb (Cannabis) B.E. 2568 (2025), in force from 26 June 2025, any sale of flower must be against a prescription on form PT.33 from one of seven prescribing groups, medical practitioners, dentists, pharmacists, Thai traditional medicine, applied Thai traditional medicine and Chinese medicine practitioners, and folk healers, and the stock sold must come from a compliant source; section 7 carries the sourcing rule and its two routes. Ministerial Regulation No. 2 B.E. 2569 (2026), in force from 30 April 2026, added the eligibility test and the licence conditions that section 3.4 sets out. Together these instruments create the three retail legal states of the current period: licensed compliant sale, a licensee dispensing against a prescription from certified stock within the bans; licensed non-compliant sale, a licensee doing anything else; and unlicensed sale.

The criminal penalty behind all of this is light: selling without a licence carries up to 1 year in prison, a fine of up to THB 20,000, or both, so the sanction that bites is the licence, and the rest of this section is about how the licence is counted, renewed and lost. Every obligation attaches to the licensee; no public source identifies a customer offence for buying flower without a prescription, so on the rules in force a buyer of flower without a prescription commits no stated offence, and the first buyer sanction in view is the Cabinet draft's fine of up to THB 60,000 for non-medical use (section 4.3).

Every retail rule in the current period is a ministerial notification, and it can change by signature, as it did on 26 June 2025. The Narcotics Code B.E. 2564 (2021) lets the Minister of Public Health, with Narcotics Control Board approval, specify Category 5 narcotics by notification rather than by primary legislation; that was the hinge of the 9 June 2022 de-scheduling, and it is also the reversal mechanism, since a Minister can put the plant back the same way. No court challenge to any cannabis notification was found, and the Supreme Court has twice applied the de-scheduling as valid law without testing it, so the ministerial route holds in both directions.

3.2 The calendar is set by the licence term, not by the bill, and it ends in 2028

Section 46 of the 2542 Act runs a licence to 31 December of the third year from its year of issue, so a whole cohort meets the renewal test together at the year end; the Minister restated the term on 22 September 2026. A licensee must file in the sixty days before expiry and, once it has filed, may keep trading until the licensor refuses, so the last day of the year is a filing deadline for a renewing shop and a stop date only for one that does not file. Conversion firms advise that a shop converts its licence to the new format by filing before expiry; a shop whose licence has expired must apply for a new licence, and DTAM may refuse either on the application, the location of the premises or other grounds (primary research, conversion firms, October 2026). Whether a shop that filed in time may trade between expiry and DTAM's decision is not settled in the published texts (Indicative). The 2023 cohort went first. Of the licences issued in 2023 and due in 2025, about 1 in 6 renewed, and the rest did not complete renewal, on DTAM licence data (as at 30 March 2026); that share is an upper bound on closures, because what those licensees did next, close or trade on without a licence, is not found in published sources; the 2025 sweep's suspensions and revocations fell in the cohort's final months, so an unpublished share of the non-renewals is sanction rather than exit. The Ministry's own reading at 28 December 2025, on applications, was a little lower. Every one of those decisions predates the eligibility test of 30 April 2026 and the penalty tariff of 22 June 2026, so that rate is the base rate of attrition before the 2026 rules, under the prescription rule, the sourcing rule and the 2025 market together. The non-renewals coincide with the prescription requirement from 26 June 2025, the certified-source rule and the market decline that primary research (dispensary visits) dates to the 2025 season; the data cannot separate those causes, and no expiry-month split is published, so the non-renewal share is a ceiling on what the prescription rule removed, not a measure of it, and the renewal count on the 2026 wave (section 11.7) is the first figure that can separate the rule from the market.

On primary research most shops sit in the two smallest formats, where legal sales are a minority of takings, and a licence whose fee is small for a Thai owner is cheap to drop when lawful trade does not carry the cost base. The regime raised the cost of lawful trade, the shops whose economics could not meet it left, and the expiry calendar, not the inspector, set the size of the licensed base (Indicative).

Two waves follow. DTAM licence data (as at 30 March 2026) put thousands of licences due to expire in each of 2026 and 2027, and both renew under Ministerial Regulation No. 2. The final wave has no licence-data count: establishment records in the DTAM Medical Cannabis GIS carried a 2028 expiry date as at 24 September 2026, a count of records in a system still catching up, not of licences in force. No renewal count for the 2026 wave had been published at the cutoff. This report's view is that the 2024 cohort will renew at or below the 2023 cohort's rate (Indicative): its entrants opened in 2024, the year the dispensary visits put at the peak of shops trading, and their first full year of trading was the year that count turned down. Exhibit 3.2 sets the three waves side by side.

Put together, the calendar is the finding. Every licence in force at the cutoff meets a renewal test by 31 December 2028, under instruments already in force, whatever Parliament does with the bill; section 4 sets what each bill outcome does to the shop that passes.

3.3 The licence series reconciles: before the 2025 expiry, after it and at 30 March 2026

Counts of Thai cannabis shops disagree because they count different things, and the licence series is the only one with a full history, recorded by cohort of issue under a three-year issue-year-inclusive term. Stacked by cohort, the licensed stock on 28 December 2025 fell, as a licence count, when the licences of the 2023 cohort that did not complete renewal left it on 31 December 2025; first-quarter 2026 issuances account for the rise to the stock in force at 30 March 2026 (Exhibit 3.3). The Ministry of Public Health's data for 28 December 2025 implied a count of establishments still operating, a different measure: the Ministry's figures rest on renewal applications received, DTAM's on renewals completed, so the two are readings of one cliff, printed side by side and never netted. The small gap between them equals the difference between DTAM's completed renewals and the Ministry's applications and, on this report's reading, reflects filings in the last days before the deadline (Indicative). The DTAM Medical Cannabis GIS is a third series, a tracking system rather than a registry; it held its own count of establishment records on 23 September 2026 and on 30 October 2026, a tracked-site floor still catching up with sites already licensed. Section 2 carries the trading-shop universe the market model runs on; licences in force and shops trading are different measures, and this report never nets one against the other.

3.4 The renewal test already exists: an eligibility list, four licence conditions and a discretion to refuse after a suspension

Ministerial Regulation No. 2 is the tightening, and it reaches every existing licence at its own expiry: one article keeps existing flower licences valid until they expire, another applies the new criteria at renewal, and a third brings pending applications under the amended rules. The eligibility list restricts a flower sale licence to an applicant who holds one of five licences or certificates, a medical facility licence, a herbal-product manufacture or sale licence, a drug manufacture or sale licence, a cannabis or hemp extract production licence or a folk healer certificate, or who operates a cultivation site that sells to licensees; it is a licence condition, not a list of who may prescribe. A shop with no other regulated identity cannot obtain a new flower licence, and the same clause applies at renewal. Four conditions travel with the licence, among them a DTAM-trained worker on duty, who is a licence condition and not a prescriber. Exhibit 3.4 walks through the five checks every renewal has passed since 30 April 2026.

The sixth element is the suspension record. After a prior suspension for breaching a controlled-herb notification, the licensing authority “shall consider not renewing”, in the regulation's words: a discretion, not an automatic bar. DTAM may refuse a conversion or a new licence on the location of the premises, so location is a site-selection point for an operator or a strategic investor. A revocation carries a statutory bar: under section 54 of the 2542 Act a revoked licensee may not apply for any licence under the Act until two years from the revocation, and after that the licensor may issue one or not at its discretion. Whether suspensions before 30 April 2026 count, whether the record follows the person or the premises, and whether a successful appeal clears it are not published (Indicative on all three).

How hard the test bites turns on an unpublished input: how many holders already hold a qualifying credential. DTAM's public GIS map as at 23 September 2026 categorised only a handful of its tracked sites as medical facilities, but the other credentials are not visible in it, so the attrition path the market sections use rests on an unpublished share (Indicative). The flower regulation carries no nationality or shareholding test on the licensee, and the three Acts behind the first three underlying licences test the applicant's domicile and do not reach shareholders (section 9.1); only the folk healer and supplying-cultivation-site routes are unpublished on this point, and growing for sale meets the List One bar (section 9.4). The ownership tests that do apply sit in the Foreign Business Act B.E. 2542 (1999), whose section 36 makes nominee holding an offence for both the Thai holder and the foreigner who allows it; section 9 carries those tests and their penalties.

On 22 October 2026, after chairing the Narcotics Control Board, the Prime Minister said amendments to the Narcotics Code would raise cannabis penalties and tighten control, and directed that licences be renewed only after inspection, not automatically; no penalty details had been published by 30 October 2026. On this report's reading, inspection before renewal adds a step to the renewal test and makes the suspension-record discretion more likely to be used, in the tightening direction, with no new rule in force.

3.5 The prescriber pool is the narrow input

Every retail sale in the current period needs a PT.33 prescription, and the pool that can write one has two published sizes, with no published text saying which binds. The seven prescribing groups held a count of registered members (press report, 26 June 2025), registered professionals, not prescribers, and only a small share of them had passed DTAM's prescriber training by 1 September 2025, with no split by profession and no later count published. Whether training is a legal precondition to prescribing is not stated in any public source. This report works on the narrower pool because the training is the only published filter tied to the form: set against the GIS establishment records at 23 September 2026, a year later, that is fewer trained prescribers than establishments, an indicative comparison and an upper bound on the constraint, since whether a PT.33 must be issued at the shop is not published (Indicative). Exhibit 3.5 sets the pool against the establishments, and against the accredited sources that section 7 discusses. DTAM's guide to a medical-cannabis service establishment requires a licensed healthcare professional, from among physicians, pharmacists, dentists and Thai traditional medicine practitioners, to oversee operations, while the Minister's statement of 22 September 2026 speaks of a resident doctor; supervising a clinic and prescribing on PT.33 are different requirements.

How shops bridge the gap comes from the dispensary visits: most keep no practitioner on the premises and use remote prescribing, a cost to the shop and a charge to the customer, who pays mainly as protection at police checkpoints. On 27 June 2026 the Ministry ordered enforcement against forged and traded PT.33 forms and said it would trace prescriptions to the issuing practitioner. The prescription is the cheapest compliance input, and a traced prescription costs most in the case where the prescription regime runs longest, the stall (Indicative).

3.6 Enforcement suspends many and revokes few; non-renewal removed the doors, and the tariff turns a filing lapse into a renewal question

Two campaigns sit side by side. From 16 June 2025 to 13 August 2025 a DTAM sweep inspected establishments, suspended and revoked licences, prosecuted cases of sale without a licence and closed shops, a closure figure the source does not define. From October 2025 (the source gives the month only) to 3 August 2026, the Minister reported, the authorities inspected shops, suspended licences and revoked a few; this report reads these as DTAM's own actions, not a national total. The first cleared the obviously non-compliant and the second applied a tariff; both campaigns' revocations together are a small fraction of the licences that did not complete renewal in the 2025 wave, and a revoked licensee is barred from any licence under the Act for two years (section 3.4).

The three enforcement series do not measure the same thing, and they are never added together. The DTAM Medical Cannabis GIS pull of 23 September 2026 marks some establishment records suspended and some revoked, against the Minister's reported suspensions and revocations from October 2025 (the source gives the month only) to 3 August 2026, and Phuket's own reported series. Each GIS record carries one status value and no date, authority or reason for a change, and the system held fewer establishment records than the licences DTAM stated in force at 30 March 2026. The flags also sit in different places from the reported sanctions. Between the pulls of 7 September 2026 and 23 September 2026 the revoked and suspended counts rose. The records do not say why the GIS flags differ from the other two series, so this report ranks the tariff risk on Phuket's own series and the 2025 sweep (section 10.2) and uses the GIS flags for neither the rank nor any count.

The DTAM penalty tariff announced on 22 June 2026 changes what a suspension means, and the guideline is unpublished, so every tariff reading rests on the announcement, not on the guideline text. It grades breaches into 30-day and 90-day suspensions with revocation on repeat and immediate revocation for, among other grounds, permitting smoking on the premises and selling online. Read with the renewal clause, a filing lapse is a 30-day suspension, and a prior suspension lets the licensor refuse renewal, so a single missed monthly form now puts a licence at risk at its next renewal. Filings, not sales, are therefore the exposed control: a missing form is visible to the licensor from its own records (this report's reading, Indicative). Exhibit 3.6 traces the path from lapse to suspension to refusal. The channel the tariff punishes most severely, online sale, is one most of the landscape uses; section 5 carries the delivery share.

So what

• Operators. A licence in force today is protected only to its own expiry; by 31 December 2028 every one is re-tested against a credential list, four licence conditions and a suspension record under rules in force since 30 April 2026, and one suspension before renewal turns a 30-day interruption into a refusal the licensor may exercise.
• Capital. The licensed base is sized by the calendar, not by the courtroom; most of the 2023 cohort did not complete renewal before any eligibility test existed, so attrition risk sits in shop economics as much as in the rules, and the share of holders with a qualifying credential, the input that decides the next waves, is unpublished (Indicative).
• Policy watchers. The regulation has already set when licences are re-tested and the floor on attrition, and the bill decides whether what survives is a retail shop or a clinic (Indicative); a renewal count for the licences due in 2026 is the first number that will show whether the 2026 test bites harder than the 2025 base rate.