Thailand deports man for violent behavior and they are trying to blame marijuana

For me personally, I rarely use ganja even though it is 100% legal here in Thailand. The buzz just isn't my style although it does for other people. For me, and I do not understand that various strains, smoking weed makes me anxious and anti-social and that is the opposite of how I want to feel in public. However, I am very happy that it is legal here because I think it is ridiculous that booze of all kinds is legal, definitely causes health issues and is a big cause of concern for road deaths that are already really bad in this country.

I know quite a few people that regularly smoke weed and all of them, when high, are the most docile people around. People that are really drunk are the opposite: They cause problems and start fights that wouldn't happen if they were not hammered drunk.

There has been some opposition to the legalization of weed in this country and I would be willing to bet that this is driven by the producers of alcohol because it is cutting into their profits. I think most of the world kind of operates this way about most things and this is why weed is illegal in a lot of places. We can't have Johnny Walker lose a couple million because weed is cheaper, right?

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I have no idea who that is in the picture, but he is clearly a fan of marijuana.

Recently, there was a singular incident where a Chinese man was causing problems in public, shouting at strangers, damaging property, and basically just acting belligerent. For some reason, the police and the media decided to make the headlines about this man, and his eventually deportation on ganja. This was based solely on an interview with a security guard at his condo that said that the Chinese guy in question had recently started smoking weed.

I'm no weed expert but I have never met a regular weed smoker who became violent after smoking it. The people that I know that get "too stoned" end up falling asleep or going home, not running around naked and screaming at strangers.

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That's the headline from one of the reports about this guy and I am upset that there seems to be a movement to revert to marijuana being illegal again. I think that this is done intentionally and there are a lot of factors at play here. It is no secret that the smuggling of illegal marijuana into the country was very profitable and a lot of the times it was the same people that are charged with preventing it entering the country that were actually importing it illegally themselves. The police are extremely corrupt in Thailand so the legalization of weed cut off a major source of revenue for them.

According to regular weed smoking friends of mine, it was not at all difficult to procure marijuana before it was legal. Some actually complain that the price of the drug has actually gone UP since it was legalized.

The Chinese man incident that they are making a big deal about in the news right now seems like a setup to me. Keeping in mind that there isn't really a free press here in Thailand, I believe this story is being used as some sort of political move to reverse the legalization of weed.

Some of the more independent media highlighted something that is very important for people to understand before they jump to conclusions about this singular incident of deportation because of weed use: When they took the Chinese guy in to be questioned they forced him to take a drug test. The test came back negative for marijuana. From what I understand, weed remains in your system for a very long time so it is safe to say that not only had the guy not had any marijuana that particular day, but he likely hadn't had any for a very long time, if he had at all. Yet they still run the story to focus on the dangers of excessive drug use.

I'm gonna quote Chris Rock when he said "whatever happened to crazy? You can't be crazy no more?" To me, this situation is one that we actually see quite a lot in Thailand, people with mental illness come over to Thailand because to some extent, being nuts is tolerated in this country a lot more than it would be elsewhere.

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I think that this story is a mess of lies intended to falsely attribute this sort of behavior with weed and that is just foolish. The only people that are going to believe it are people that have never used marijuana. Erratic and violent behavior is something that comes along with booze or meth (called Ya-Ba in Thailand) and if there are drugs involved in this situation at all, it isn't weed.

I'm just hopeful that whoever is behind this effort to vilify weed in an effort to make it illegal again fails. This legalization is one of the few things that I have actually been proud of the government doing here in Thailand.