Myanmar businesses have been setting up shop in Thailand since it decriminalised cannabis last year, while back in Myanmar, a pioneering dispensary has opened in an area controlled by the armed resistance.
By FRONTIER
Backpackers browsing the vicinity of Bangkok’s Khao San Road since last year will have noticed a new addition to the tourist entertainment hub. Where once cannabis could only be sought through whispered deals with street-side dealers, the drug can now be bought and enjoyed at dozens of brick-and-mortar dispensaries and recreation rooms. But there is one shop that stands apart for marijuana connoisseurs from Myanmar: the Lollipop Farm Cannabis Dispensary.
Its walls hung with paintings of the ruined temples of Bagan and traditional Myanmar dancers, the shop’s ambience has an unmistakable flavour – established in February this year, this is the first Myanmar cannabis brand to open a shop in Thailand. Until then, Lollipop Farm was confined to the black market in Myanmar, where penalties for growing and dealing with cannabis are still as harsh as they used to be in Thailand.
Myanmar’s Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Law lists the “cannabis plant” as a narcotic drug, with no distinction made between intoxicating and non-intoxicating varieties known as hemp. Those caught with any amount of it up to 100 grammes face at least five years in prison, while possession in excess of this amount and production of the drug both entail a sentence from 10 years to life in prison.
For the moment, the brand cannot import cannabis from Myanmar, but it has established several cannabis farms in northern Thailand, where it plans to grow Myanmar native strains with the help of professional cannabis breeders and register them under Thai law.
Lollipop Farm started their business in 2020 by growing weed in several farms in Myanmar. They formed a well-organised cooperative with the goal of leading the country’s cannabis market and they largely succeeded, thanks to the high quality of their buds, use of unique packing and wide distribution networks, carefully kept under wraps.
“We come from the black market, but here [in Thailand] we want everything to be legal, from the firm to the shop,” a Lollipop Farm member of staff told Frontier, adding that they plan to open another shop in Pattaya, a beach town southeast of Bangkok.
“The Thai market is incredibly huge but honestly, I enjoyed working in the black market more. It was full of risk and fun, and the benefits were amazing,” said the staff member, asking not to be named.
Lollipop Farm has entered a blooming and promising market in Thailand, which has grown exponentially since the government decriminalised cannabis in June last year and is bound to grow even more. According to the University of Thai Chamber of Commerce, the cannabis market in the country will expand roughly 15 percent annually, and it could reach US$1.2 billion by 2025. To put things in perspective, that figure is not far from the sales of natural gas from Myanmar’s Rakhine State last year to China, which amounted to $1.43 billion.
“The Myanmar cannabis industry is now millions of years behind, and there’s nothing we can do about it. All we can do is to work in the Thai market,” the Lollipop Farm staffer said.
The entrepreneurs at the company are not the only Myanmar people with the Thai market in their sights. In the border town of Mae Sot, the Myanmar cannabis brand Green Wave is going legal by working with Thai business Mari to open the biggest cannabis bar in town in a four-storey building. They held a pre-opening event on April 20, giving away free cannabis to all visitors.
Cannabis cultures in Myanmar
“Actually, in Myanmar, there are many more cannabis and hemp farms than you would ever imagine,” said Ko Htet, founder of Green Wave.
His words are confirmed by the countless farms growing cannabis in Sagaing, Magway, Mandalay and Ayeyarwady regions that feed the local market. As with the rest of the world, drugs sales in Myanmar have moved increasingly online in recent years, although rather than the dark web, much of it takes place in plain sight on Facebook.
The native cannabis strain predominant in Myanmar is the “mango” variety, a sativa dominant that gives a flavour similar to the fruit of the same name. Yet, due to the lack of know-how, strains from Myanmar cannot produce premium buds, known as “exotic”, and cannot be sold at high prices. In these circumstances, cannabis producers can only look with envy at their counterparts in Thailand, where decriminalisation has made it possible to develop new and better strains.
The cannabis plant features in the cultures of Myanmar ethnic groups like the Rawang and the Ta’ang. The Rawang, who live in northern Kachin State, traditionally use hemp clothes to dress toddlers, believing this will give them good health. Traditional medicine in Kachin also uses buds, roots and seeds from the plant to produce balms and oil.
Hemp clothing is also traditionally made by the Ta’ang, in a laborious process where cannabis stalks are pounded and soaked with rice in water for several days, before the separated fibres are spun into a thread. The resulting garments are used in weddings and funerals. For the latter, they are dyed white and carried by Buddhist monks at the head of a procession taking the dead body to a cemetery, and then buried along with the deceased. However, the banning of cannabis has forced Ta’ang to use other materials in recent decades.
“Our government has always been stupid by banning cannabis. Cannabis and hemp not only never had the chance to become an industry, but also those interesting cultural practices have almost become extinct,” said Ko Htet.
High on revolution
The idea of establishing cannabis dispensaries in the open has made it into Myanmar, in territory freed from military control by armed resistance groups. One such outlet opened mid last year in Kayah State, where the resistance, led by the Karenni National Defence Force, has made enormous gains.
The dispensary, first called Moe Ma Kha and then De Culture Cannabis, operates under KNDF protection in rural Demoso Township. It offers about 20 strains of cannabis, as well as related products like bongs, grinders and rolling paper, and has a coffee shop attached.
“This is the very first cannabis shop in Myanmar, and we have been able to open it because we have our own liberated area,” shop owner Ko Win Oo, also a KNDF fighter, told Frontier. “This shows how modernised we are and how free our ideology is, because we have never had the opportunity to do anything like this under military rule.”
The shop offers shares to KNDF soldiers injured in battle who cannot return to combat, and also helps to fund the armed group as a whole, Win Oo explained.
Win Oo said he is now encouraging local opium farmers to cultivate cannabis instead of poppies, and this season he is growing the plant in a plot of land of about 100 acres. Yet, finding a larger market for his produce is a big challenge, he explains.
Win Oo’s dream is to open more cannabis dispensaries as resistance forces gain territory. He believes that, once the military is defeated, cannabis will not be illegal anymore because the military and its allies are the only narrow-minded institutions in Myanmar.
However, it’s unclear how far this dream is shared by the wider resistance movement. Neither the parallel National Unity Government, nor any of the ethnic armed organisations allied to it, have publicly supported legalising the drug. Moreover, many anti-military armed groups retain strict anti-drug platforms, although they tend to target the use and sale of methamphetamines and opiates in their territories rather than cannabis.
But Win Oo remains bullish: “As I see it, the people from the ethnic minorities, the ethnic armed group leaders and people taking part in the revolution have no problem with cannabis; they don’t really see it as a drug. That makes me confident that my dream will come true.”
