Thai stick

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A bundle of Thai sticks, from the Drug Enforcement Administration's 1979 handbook Drugs of Abuse.

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Thai stick is a form of herbal cannabis made by tying the seedless flowering tops of female plants with thread or fibre around a thin stick, usually a sliver of bamboo. It was made in north-east Thailand, in the region of Isan, for export from the late 1960s until the trade was suppressed in the 1980s; in New Zealand and Australia it was known as the Buddha stick.^{: para. 12: 289}

The product became known abroad during the Vietnam War, when tens of thousands of American servicemen were stationed in Thailand.^: 65 Through the 1970s and 1980s Thai sticks, and later pressed Thai marijuana, reached the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand. Early consignments went by post, in luggage and as air freight; later cargoes of tens of tons were landed from mother ships on the Pacific coast of North America. Forensic laboratories treated the sticks as a class of their own: the British Government Chemist found Thai material the best-quality herbal cannabis it received in the mid-1970s, averaging 7.8 per cent THC in 1975 and 9.3 per cent in 1976, before its quality fell.

Pressed, stickless Thai marijuana was on the American market by 1982,^: 207 and in 1983 American intelligence wrote that demand for the expensive sticks, a "specialty product", "may even decline as use of domestic sinsemilla increases".^: 12 Thailand began a large-scale eradication campaign in 1984, and the United States continued to urge it to eliminate the crop; growers moved some cultivation into Laos and Cambodia.^: 20 Seed from Thai cannabis entered the breeding of sinsemilla in North America and Europe in the 1970s.^{: para. 12} Since cannabis was removed from Thailand's list of narcotics in 2022, the English name has been given to Thai landraces such as Hang Kra Rog of the Phu Phan range.

Name

English speakers called the product the Thai stick, or simply Thai. Dictionary.com, which draws on the Random House dictionary, defines a Thai stick as "a cigar-shaped stick of highly potent marijuana from Thailand" and dates the term's first recorded use to 1975–80. The earliest dated citation in Green's Dictionary of Slang is a report in The Times of 14 August 1976, in which a customs officer described two parcels at the overseas mail office "found to contain photograph albums packed with thai sticks, a form of cannabis". Maguire and Ritter cite an earlier American report, headed "Thai Sticks Newest Drug Threat", in the Times Herald of Middletown, New York, of 28 April 1974, whose reporter called the sticks "three times stronger than regular marijuana".^{: 194, 224} A guide to drug-abuse research terminology published by the National Institute on Drug Abuse in 1982 defined Thai sticks as "potent, seedless marijuana grown in Thailand, Vietnam, and Nepal that is packaged and tied in bundles that resemble sticks".^: 92

The name Buddha stick was used for the same product in Australia^: 180 and in New Zealand, where the sociologist Greg Newbold describes the first large-scale smuggling of the mid-1970s as directed at "high-grade cannabis known as 'buddha sticks'".^: 289 In 1975 the Waikato Times, a New Zealand newspaper, reported that police and customs officers would no longer use the term "Buddha sticks", having "been told to use cannabis or marijuana sticks instead".^: 7 The name also appears in a United States Navy court-martial of 1976, in which a seaman was convicted of bringing "1027 (buddha) sticks of marijuana" aboard a naval vessel. Green's defines Buddha sticks as "marijuana grown in Thailand, which is sold wrapped around small, satay sticks". Peter Maguire, a historian, and Mike Ritter, who smuggled hashish and marijuana for eighteen years from 1968, built their history of the trade on interviews with smugglers and law-enforcement agents; they write that Thai sticks were "reverently known as Buddha Sticks".^: 53

In Thai the plant and the drug are kancha (กัญชา), which the SEAlang dictionary glosses as "hashish, marijuana, i.e. Indian hemp (Cannabis sativa)". The ethnobotanist Marie Alexandrine Martin, whose fieldwork of the early 1970s was mainly in Cambodia, with observations in Thailand, Laos and Vietnam, traced the name used across the region to the Sanskrit ganja. In Thailand she also recorded kanhcha thai, kanhcha thet ("foreign") and kanhcha cin ("Chinese"), but wrote that without plant samples she could not say what each corresponded to botanically; the Lao name was kan xa, and in Thailand the word kali denoted the inflorescences.^: 63–65

Form

The construction of a Thai stick and of a twenty-stick brick, as described in court opinions and in the account of a village in Udon in 1971.

A Thai stick was made from the seedless flowering tops of female plants, bound to a thin stick. Maguire and Ritter describe the buds as tied "to a small hemp stick with a thread of hemp fiber or fishing line".^: 53 The geographer Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy describes Thai sticks as "dense inflorescences of seedless marihuana bent and tied to the stem of the plant".^{: para. 12} Other accounts name bamboo. A British smuggler, Leaf Fielding, describing a village in Udon in 1971 in an account that Maguire and Ritter quote, wrote that "A stick held a dozen or more heads of grass, bound with fine hempen fibre around an eight-inch sliver of bamboo."^: 63 The Laboratory of the Government Chemist in London recorded the Thai cannabis it received as "Green or brown sticks of several seedless tops tied around bamboo", with a number of sticks compressed into a slab. The drug intelligence estimate of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for 1982 described Thai sticks as "dried marihuana leaves and buds which have been wrapped around small bamboo sticks", weighing from one to ten grams.^: 62 The Drug Enforcement Administration's handbook Drugs of Abuse described them as "marihuana buds bound onto short sections of bamboo" in its revision of July 1979, printed as an issue of the agency's magazine Drug Enforcement, and in nearly the same words in 1988.^: 37: 45 The official history of military law in the United States Marine Corps in Vietnam describes the "Thai stick" encountered at the Marine base at Nam Phong in 1972 and 1973 differently, as "marijuana soaked in water and dried into a cigar-like shape".^{: 233, 238–239} Newsweek, in an article of October 1978 reprinted in the record of a Senate hearing, wrote that on the West Coast "cigar-size 'Thai sticks' from Thailand continue to arrive".^: 115

American court opinions describe the same construction. Describing a cargo landed on the coast of San Luis Obispo County in 1976, the California Court of Appeal wrote of marijuana "from the female tops of the plant that is wrapped around a bamboo shoot and secured to the shoot by a small piece of thread". In 1980 the same court, citing that issue of Drug Enforcement, wrote that the sticks were "four to six inches long to a diameter roughly about three-fourths of an inch". A federal appeals court in 1981 glossed the term as "marijuana flakes from Thailand that have been compressed on a stick".

In Fielding's account a stick weighed about four grams.^: 63 In 1977 The Vancouver Sun described a Thai stick as "a shoot of bamboo, four to five inches long, wrapped tightly with the flowering tops of the female marijuana plant", and at "$20 to $25 for a two-gram stick" the most expensive form of marijuana a dealer had to offer.^: 104 In a Navy court-martial of 1978 four Thai sticks sold for $100 weighed 4.4 grams together, while 108 sticks seized in Alaska weighed "just under one pound". Sticks were tied into bundles: Fielding wrote that twenty made a brick,^: 63 and an American buyer interviewed by Maguire and Ritter recalled "little bricks of twenty sticks".^: 76 For the large sea cargoes of later years, Maguire and Ritter describe sticks "put in vacuum bags, given a shot of nitrogen, heat sealed, and graded", the grades running from 1X to a top grade called MKK.^: 133

Some descriptions say the sticks were treated with opium or oil. In its account of a sale arranged in Wisconsin in 1975, the Wisconsin Supreme Court described Thai sticks as "small bamboo shoots filled with marijuana and laced with opium" and then stated that the sticks in the case "were not laced with opium, but contained only marijuana and hashish".^: 392 A footnote to the dissent defines the sticks as compressed marijuana "mixed with opium gum" and says that those in the case "consisted of compressed marijuana and hashish".^: 402 A newspaper column that Guam's delegate, Antonio Won Pat, had printed in the Congressional Record in 1977 spoke of "a high-potency, opium-coated marijuana concoction known in the drug culture as 'Thai sticks'" passing through Guam.^: 20227 Four years earlier Lester Wolff, reporting to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on a study mission to South-East Asia in August 1973, had written that drugs smuggled from Thailand to American military installations throughout the Pacific included "marihuana which has been laced with opium". Military authorities told him that 78.5 per cent of the 557 suspects in drug cases investigated by American agencies in Thailand in the 1973 fiscal year "involved the use of marihuana"; he described "opiated marihuana" as "a new headache for the military commander" and reproduced the instructions that military authorities had distributed on testing marijuana for opiates, headed "Testing marihuana for opiates or is my joint laced?"^: 42 Green's Dictionary of Slang defines the Thai stick as marijuana "soaked in hashish oil" and quotes a 2001 glossary of New Zealand prison slang in which the sticks were "sometimes dipped in marijuana oil".

Forensic classification

Forensic laboratories recorded Thai sticks as a class of their own. The British Laboratory of the Government Chemist sorted imported cannabis by country of origin and by appearance, and its staff wrote in 1980 that the Thai sticks were "a recent feature of cannabis from South-East Asia. When first encountered these were of consistently high quality, but this has fallen of late." In the United States the University of Mississippi's Potency Monitoring Project, which analysed seized cannabis for the National Institute on Drug Abuse, divided the 35,312 samples it analysed between 1980 and 1997 into "marijuana (loose material, kilobricks and buds), sinsemilla, Thai sticks and ditchweed". By March 2009 the project had classed 39 samples as Thai sticks, with an average Δ9-THC content of 3.70 per cent of dry weight and a range of 0.05 to 8.92 per cent.

Making Thai sticks

In Isan, Maguire and Ritter write, growers began by removing the males: "Male plants were immediately ripped from the ground" because pollinated females set seed.^: 65 Chouvy cites this passage as evidence that seedless cannabis was grown in north-east Thailand before sinsemilla growing began in North America.^{: para. 12–13} A Thai broker from the north-east whom Maguire and Ritter quote said that growers "plant at nearly the end of the rainy season" and that a plant grown the full cycle of about six months reached about two and a half metres; another said that each grower kept only about a hundred plants so as to tend them well.^{: 63, 66} Official accounts of the season differ. The Mounted Police estimate for 1982 put planting "at the onset of the rainy season in May" and harvesting from December, with "harvesting and drying stages" continuing into March,^: 62 while the State Department in 1990 described the main north-eastern crop as "planted in the late fall and harvested in December, January, and February", with a second crop harvested in April and May. Maguire and Ritter write that once harvested "the plants were hung upside down in the shade", and that "Traditionally banana leaves were wrapped around the buds; when they turned brown, it meant the pot was perfectly dried".^: 65

The tying was village work. In Fielding's account of Udon in 1971, "mothers and children sat in groups in the dirt, making up Buddha sticks", while the bricks "were being put together by the old people".^: 63 Maguire and Ritter quote a Thai grower's guess at how the stick began: the first sticks were about the size of a cigarette and wrapped in newspaper, and with a stick inside, smokers "can roll it in paper and just pull the stick out".^: 66 They also report the claim that Thai sticks were made to cater to American soldiers, and answer it by observing that in Thai markets "everything from flowers to frogs is tied to a stick".^: 65

The crop was financed and moved by intermediaries. Maguire and Ritter write that growers "were independently contracted by traders who put up the capital", and that kamnan, regional leaders "who controlled multiple villages and large swaths of the northeast", hired villagers "to grow pot and carry it over the Phu Phan Mountains" at night to avoid police checkpoints, each man being paid "a few thousand baht for every 20 kilos successfully delivered".^: 71 A 1985 article by Mounted Police drug-intelligence staff in the United Nations Bulletin on Narcotics cited "Recent intelligence reports from Thailand" that placed cultivation "on hilly terrain and on flat lowlands", often "interspersed among legitimate crops to deter detection", in 12 of the 17 north-eastern provinces, "centred around Nakhon Phanom, Sakhon Nakhon and Nong Khai".

Cannabis in Thailand and Laos

A formula from the pharmacopoeia of King Narai that names cannabis, in the Bangkok printing of 1917.

Cannabis bought in the market at Vientiane, Laos, in May 1973 and kept as a herbarium specimen by Marie A. Martin.

Martin's fieldwork, published in 1975, found cannabis grown on a family scale across the region, a few plants around the house, with the female flowering tops smoked with tobacco in cigarettes or in bamboo water pipes and the leaves and flowers used in food and medicine.^{: 63, 67, 70–73} In Thailand ground flowers were added to the curry kaeng phet.^: 73 She wrote that cultivation was hardly more widespread in Thailand than in Laos or Cambodia, "except perhaps in the north and in a few central regions", and that since the formation of a new government in December 1971 cannabis "has not appeared openly" in Thailand and its use in popular medicine had been regulated.^: 66–67 In Laos her informants distinguished three qualities, the first and strongest being the crop "harvested in the winter when covered with dew".^: 68

The physician Joel Fort, writing in the Bulletin on Narcotics in 1965, described cannabis in Thailand as "widely used in the country, particularly in the north-east by smoking in pipes or cigarettes or adding it to food". Two Thai researchers at Chulalongkorn University, Charas Suwanwela and Vichai Poshyachinda, wrote in 1986 that in South-East Asia "Ganja curry is considered a delicacy, while ganja is smoked by villagers on a relatively small scale", and that it had traditionally been used in medicine, including for asthma.

Thai law named cannabis in the Cannabis Act, B.E. 2477, which was enacted on 26 April B.E. 2478 (1935) and published in the Royal Gazette on 5 May 1935,^: 339 although English-language studies date it to 1934. It forbade planting cannabis or keeping its seed, possessing, buying, selling, distributing or smoking it, and bringing it into the kingdom or sending it out, with licences for medicine, and it gave those already growing it a year to harvest and sell the crop.^: 340–342 Cannabis appears in three formulas of the pharmacopoeia of King Narai and in fourteen of the medical inscriptions at Wat Pho.^: 334 The Narcotics Act of 1979 (B.E. 2522) placed marijuana among the narcotics of its Category V. Maguire and Ritter quote a Thai broker recalling that "Almost every corner, every house, they have it in the yard growing".^: 62

The export trade

Soldiers, travellers and the first exports

Chouvy writes that Thai sticks "had become famous in the late 1960s after the Vietnam War introduced U.S. soldiers to Thai cannabis".^{: para. 12} Suwanwela and Poshyachinda judged that "The increased demand for cannabis during the war in Vietnam and the high profit derived from trafficking in this drug were probably the main factors that stimulated its widespread cultivation in South-East Asia, especially in the north-eastern part of Thailand." Maguire and Ritter write that after the United States built five major military bases in Thailand "the marijuana industry exploded and cheap, powerful pot was as readily available as beer".^: 65 A psychiatrist reporting cases of psychosis among American airmen wrote that marijuana use among "the 45,000 Air Force troops stationed in Thailand during the period September 1971 to September 1972 was extensive". The staff of a Senate subcommittee investigating drug abuse in the armed forces reported in 1971 that in Thailand they "had no difficulty in procuring 'tailored' marihuana cigarettes with filter-tips", fifteen for $1.50, and that the average sample of marijuana in South-East Asia contained "between 3.5 and 4.0 percent THC".^: 365 M. Nishikawa, formerly of the Asia and Far East Institute for the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders in Tokyo, wrote that when Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore became ports of call for American forces in Vietnam, "indulgence in cannabis resurfaced followed by heroin abuse a few years later". At the Marine base at Nam Phong, according to the Marine Corps history, "drugs and marijuana were more readily available in Thailand than in Vietnam".^: 238

Maguire and Ritter trace the American trade to servicemen and to smugglers who had worked the overland hippie trail. In their account, ten pounds of marijuana that an American on leave bought in a market in Vientiane reached Honolulu through the Army Post Office in 1968 and sold within days at $1,000 a pound.^: 4–5 They write that the American crackdown on the Mexican border in 1969, Operation Intercept, "pushed smugglers to set up operations from farther-flung Hippie Trail outposts", and that when the political situation in Afghanistan made it "nearly impossible for foreigners in the hash business", hashish smugglers turned to Thailand; one recalled that "we naturally gravitated to Thailand".^{: 26, 52} "By the early 1970s," they write, "the foreign demand for ganja had produced a boom in Isan, the poorest region of Thailand".^: 63 The resort of Pattaya on the Gulf of Thailand mattered in the early years because "it was where the small sailboats came to buy pot", taking small loads of Thai sticks to Bali, Australia and elsewhere.^: 74 In 1982 two foreign women were arrested in Bali for selling ganja brought from Bangkok by way of Hong Kong, Singapore and Jakarta; the head of a police narcotics unit told the Indonesian newspaper Merdeka that the Thai sticks they had been selling were "of higher quality than other ganja".^: 9–10 Stephen Snelders, summarising Fielding's memoir in a history of smuggling into the Netherlands, writes that Fielding found in Thailand an underground drug economy that "the presence of American soldiers had stimulated", bought a few kilograms of cannabis in a village and carried them in his backpack on a flight from Malaysia to Heathrow.^: 256

Early consignments went by post and air freight. In late 1975 United States Customs intercepted a package mailed from Thailand to Clarkston, Washington, that held about ten pounds of marijuana; a second package found in the same house "contained a sizable quantity of marijuana 'Thai-sticks'". At San Francisco International Airport customs officers opened an air-freight carton from Thailand and found inside one of two pillows "more than 400 'Thai-sticks', a high potency form of marijuana and worth around $12,500". One of Maguire and Ritter's subjects sent his first load from Udorn to Hawaii as air freight, in boxes labelled as scientific equipment.^: 57 A federal appeals court in 1978 described a group that planned "to obtain marijuana, in the form of high grade Thai sticks, in Thailand and to smuggle it into the United States", one member of which made four trips to Thailand to buy it. Air and overland routes stayed in use. The American intelligence estimate for 1980 recorded that "Thai traffickers were active in Mexico as early as 1977 in the smuggling of Thai-stick marihuana",^: 36 and the Drug Enforcement Administration's official history pictures porcelain vases used to conceal Thai sticks, taken in a seizure of 100 pounds at Tijuana in 1977.^: 31 The 1980 estimate also lists 1,796 pounds of Thai sticks seized at Honolulu International Airport "en route from Japan" in March 1980 and 223 pounds discovered at San Francisco International Airport that October.^: 95–96

By sea to North America

Larger loads went by sea. Maguire and Ritter describe an albacore fishing boat, the Ancient Mariner, that left Southern California in the summer of 1975 and loaded off Ko Tao in the Gulf of Thailand; one participant believed it "the first boatload that went to Thailand", while admitting that he could not verify it.^: 95–98 They write that seizures of marijuana in American waters, from all sources, "leaped from just over 200,000 pounds in 1975 to 3,000,000 pounds by 1978".^: 126 Figures that the Coast Guard supplied to a House subcommittee in 1979 show it seizing 10,185 pounds of Thai sticks in 1976, 17,130 pounds in 1977 and 4,500 pounds in 1978.^: 41 A table of seizures aboard vessels in 1978, printed in the record of a Senate hearing, lists 4,500 pounds of Thai sticks, valued at $11,664,000, seized at Barnes Island, Washington, on 23 October.^: 65 The Department of Transportation reported that the Coast Guard's seizures in the 1980 fiscal year included "over 12,000 pounds of Thai sticks".^: 11 The 1985 Mounted Police article described the route: cannabis was carried "in bulk to Bangkok or to various points along the Gulf of Thailand where small vessels, such as fishing trawlers, supply mother ships". Maguire and Ritter describe one such cargo, just under ten tons of "grade-A Thai sticks" ordered at "$50,000 per ton plus delivery costs", as "handpicked from dozens of farms between Udorn and Nakhon Phanom" and "carefully sealed in small plastic bags that were bundled inside large gunny sacks".^: 101–102

Many of these landings came before the courts. On the evening of 31 October 1976 police on the coast of San Luis Obispo County stopped a rental truck carrying 147 wooden boxes with about 6,000 pounds of Thai sticks that had just been brought ashore, valued on the street at $45 million to $50 million. In November 1978 the Royal Canadian Mounted Police searched the vessel Euphoric at Victoria, British Columbia, and found twelve Thai sticks; its mate said that he had carried about 7,000 pounds of marijuana from Thailand to a point about 250 miles west of San Francisco and transferred it there to the yacht Tahuna. In 1979 an organisation known as the Coronado Company arranged for "approximately two tons of Thai stick marijuana" to be bought in Thailand and landed from one of its vessels on a remote beach in northern California; a second, larger operation lost "a substantial part of the six tons of Thai sticks", and a plan made late in 1979 was to land seven tons at Neah Bay, Washington, by helicopter. In Garrett v. United States (1985) the Supreme Court considered a defendant who had pleaded guilty to importing 12,000 pounds of marijuana at Neah Bay in August 1980 and was then indicted in Florida for conspiring, between January 1976 and July 1981, to import "multi-ton quantities of marihuana and marihuana 'Thai sticks'".^: 786 The intelligence estimate for 1980 lists 12,000 pounds of Thai sticks "found adrift off Neah Bay, Washington" on 27 August that year.^: 96

An article in the Drug Enforcement Administration's magazine in 1983 described the Fort Lauderdale organisation of Donald Steinberg, a group "nearly all under 30 years old" whose leader testified that it had grossed over $100 million in 1978; it had wired $6 million through offshore banks in the Cayman Islands to its office in Hong Kong "to set up the machinery to smuggle Thai sticks to the U.S. West Coast".^: 12–13 Vice President George Bush told the National Press Club in June 1983 that the West Coast represented "our most difficult and challenging tactical problem": "Ships carrying Thai sticks, a very high grade of marijuana, work their way across the Pacific on great circle routes and approach the west coast from the North." At a meeting of the coordinating committee of the National Narcotics Border Interdiction System that August, the chairman listed the seizures made since 10 June, among them over a million pounds of marijuana and 34,000 pounds of Thai sticks. A Drug Enforcement Administration report of February 1985 noted "an increase in smuggling of high-potency marijuana grown in Thailand, commonly known as 'Thai Sticks'", while counting the sticks among the "other cannabis products of lesser significance", smuggled to the West Coast "via non-commercial vessels".^: 7–8

On the Atlantic coast a group that had fraudulently borrowed $10 million from the First National Bank of Chicago bought the boat Adeline C and a landing site in Rhode Island, where it "unloaded eight tons of marijuana smuggled from Thailand". In 1984 about 10,000 pounds of Thai marijuana were sailed to the Oregon coast aboard the Aldabaran. On 9 April 1985 the United States Customs Service and the Coast Guard seized the fishing trawler Oregon Beaver off San Francisco, "laden with 22 tons of Thai marijuana". A plea memorandum describes a 42-ton load landed on the West Coast in September 1987 by a group one of whose members lived in Thailand and had contacts to obtain marijuana "from sources who cultivated and stockpiled the marijuana", and on 26 August 1988 sheriff's deputies in Santa Cruz County interrupted "dozens of men in the process of bringing some 10,000 kilograms of Thai marijuana ashore". In 1990 and 1991 a group imported Thai marijuana to California aboard the ketch Asmara.

The same supply reached Canada. In May 1977 the Mounted Police seized two and a half tons of Thai sticks from a fibreglass septic tank buried on a farm near Chilliwack, British Columbia, a seizure that The Vancouver Sun said was "billed as the biggest drug seizure in Canadian history"; a Vancouver drug-squad officer put the THC content of the sticks at 12 per cent, against two to six per cent in other grades.^: 90: 104 That July the Mounted Police seized 400 pounds of Thai sticks, valued at $2 million, from two vehicles at Surrey, near Vancouver.^: 41 The 1985 Mounted Police article put marijuana from Thailand at about 20 per cent of the Canadian illicit market in 1983 and 1984, described "Thai sticks" as one of the varieties "known for their high content of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)" and popular in parts of the country, and cited a seizure of 760 kilograms at Vancouver in March 1984.

New Zealand and Australia

In New Zealand, Newbold writes, "by 1974 large-scale cannabis smuggling had commenced", and by 1975 the police knew that organised networks were importing drugs from South-East Asia, interest at first being "restricted to high-grade cannabis known as 'buddha sticks'".^: 289 The syndicate later known as the "Mr Asia" organisation began in this trade. A royal commission that reported to the Governor-General of New Zealand in 1983 found that after his release from prison in 1974 Terrence Clark began by distributing cannabis imported by Martin Johnstone and his associates, who used seamen of the Straat shipping line to bring it into the country, and that "In 1975 Clark made several trips to South East Asia, bringing thai sticks to New Zealand".^: 14 From Clark's own telling, Newbold describes how Clark took the Buddha sticks of a courier newly arrived from Bangkok by having men posing as detectives stop him at the roadside.^: 289 Clark, the commission found, soon used couriers and turned to heroin, "which had the advantage of being much more valuable in relation to its volume than cannabis".^: 14 Newbold writes that "By 1977, buddha sticks had started to become rare in New Zealand and had been replaced by high grade imported heroin", and that in the early 1980s imported cannabis "vanished and was replaced by hemp grown domestically".^{: 289, 291–292}

The report of a United States congressional study mission of January 1978 said that in Australia cannabis was "usually imported as Thai sticks (from Bangkok) or hashish".^: 8 In a doctoral thesis on cannabis in Australia, John Jiggens quotes a "market report" from the counterculture magazine Australasian Seed for July 1977, which found Buddha sticks "scarce" in Melbourne and in Sydney "readily available. $12-15 per stick retail".^: 149 He writes that between 1977 and 1978 Sydney prices for imported Thai sticks "more than doubled".^: 61 In June 1977 Murray Riley, a former New South Wales detective sergeant, began arranging what Jiggens calls "a massive importation of buddha sticks destined for both the US and the Australian market". Riley's ship, the Chorya Maru, left Bangkok on 30 March 1978 after loading two consignments in Thailand, and police seized the cargo as it was unloaded from a second vessel, the ketch Anoa, near Coffs Harbour on 10 June 1978.^{: 175, 180} Jiggens puts Riley's whole consignment at 4.5 tonnes of Buddha sticks, "the Australian import record until 1984".^: 161

Britain

In Britain, where Thai sticks were arriving by post in 1976, the Laboratory of the Government Chemist found that in the first years of its survey "herbal cannabis from South East Asia was consistently the best quality" it received. Forensic scientists recalled in 1997 that before the 1990s "High-quality seedless cannabis from South-East Asia having mean THC levels of over 9 per cent was available in a form known as 'Thai sticks'."

Production and suppression in Thailand

Thai officials and foreign police located the crop in the north-east. In June 1977 the Bangkok English-language newspaper Morning Express reported the seizure of a ton of marijuana at a village chief's house in Bang Khen district, near Don Muang; the suspects said they had been hired to carry it from Nakhon Phanom to Bangkok and pack it into small boxes, and the police put its local price at around 300,000 baht and its worth "in the Western countries" at 30 million baht.^: 31 Ten days later police told the newspaper Nation Review that Nakhon Phanom was "the largest marihuana growing province in the northeast"; "It is second only to rice there," a senior officer said.^: 26 The secretary-general of Thailand's Narcotics Control Board, Chavalit Yodmani, wrote in 1983 that "the main cannabis plantation fields are in the northeastern part of the country". The State Department reported in 1986 that most commercial production centred "around Nakhon Phanom, where the highest quality marijuana is grown", and that the average $17 a kilogram paid to farmers earned them five times the income of tomatoes, the next most profitable crop. A Drug Enforcement Administration price survey of 1987 put Thai marijuana at $5–10 a pound to the grower, $11–33 to the broker and $850–1,300 at wholesale in the United States, against $325–650 for Mexican and $550–900 for Colombian marijuana.

The United States urged Thailand to destroy the crop. Maguire and Ritter write that "To appease the Americans, the Thai government set up a new Narcotics Suppression Committee in 1972", and judge that although "there was a superficial shift in Thai policy, the market forces were too powerful".^: 68–69 In December 1982 the acting administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Francis Mullen, told a House subcommittee that South-East Asian marijuana, "commonly referred to as 'Thai Sticks'", had "not been a significant factor in the supply of marihuana consumed in the United States", but that recent indications, among them rising seizures and the involvement of Bangkok opiate traffickers, suggested that "Thailand has become a source country for marihuana marketed in the United States".^: 19 The intelligence estimate for 1983 put Thailand, with Laos and six other countries, among producers that together supplied about five per cent of the marijuana consumed in the United States; it found cannabis "an important cash crop in 11 of the 17 provinces" of the north-east, its spread "partially financed by Thai and foreign syndicates" smuggling "principally to Australia, New Zealand, and the United States".^: 12 The estimate for 1984 described Thai marijuana, "which has a relatively high THC content", as smuggled to the United States "in increasing quantities"; it reported cannabis grown in 12 of the 17 north-eastern provinces, with cultivation "financed to some extent by Thai and foreign syndicates", and wrote that the Thai government had begun "a large-scale eradication campaign in 1984 and destroyed 3,000 metric tons of marijuana".^: 20 The Thai government reported eradicating 2,400 hectares in 1985 and more than 3,000 in 1986, and its seizures rose from about 39 tonnes in 1984 to 106 tonnes in 1986.^: 20 In 1988 the State Department said it was encouraging Thailand "to eliminate its crop, which because of its high-quality, commands a high price on the international market".

Cultivation moved as it was suppressed. An assessment in the Central Intelligence Agency's Narcotics Review of August 1986 reported cultivation spreading to several north-central provinces, where a syndicate "headed by a former member of parliament from northeastern Thailand" sponsored about 50 hectares in Sukhothai and Lampang and had "secured high-level police protection". It found Thai traffickers "increasingly" turning to Laos, where a government enterprise, the Mountainous Area Development Company, promoted cultivation, served as "the principal buying agent for the provinces" and coordinated sales to Thai buyers, and judged that "a significant share of future marijuana exports from Thailand to the United States is likely to be Lao grown". American intelligence reported in 1987 that "A number of Thai traffickers have shifted some of their cultivation into neighboring Laos and Kampuchea", and later wrote that in the late 1980s "Most of the marijuana for the U.S. market came from Thailand and Laos, and, to a lesser extent, Cambodia", carried by truck to the coast and by trawler to ocean-going ships in the Gulf of Thailand, a stage of the traffic "dominated by Americans".^: 35 Yodmani wrote in 1992 that illicit cannabis was "grown mainly in remote areas of northeastern Thailand" but had spread to provinces in the centre and south, and that only eradication was used against it because "Cannabis is more profitable than any other cash crop". In 1999 the State Department reported that Thailand still grew marijuana in the north-east, in quantities reduced by enforcement "as well as by competition from growers in Cambodia", and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime wrote in 2006 that Cambodian production was "reputed to be 'contract cultivation'" financed or controlled by foreign, especially Thai, syndicates, and that most Lao production was "for export to Thailand, undertaken on contract for Thai organized crime groups". By 2010, according to Thai authorities cited by the UNODC, cultivation in Thailand "had been drastically reduced over a period of 20 years", and cannabis was being smuggled into Thailand from Laos.

Quality and the end of the stick

The British laboratory measured the THC content of Thai seizures year by year. Thai cannabis seized in 1975 averaged 7.8 per cent total THC and that seized in 1976 averaged 9.3 per cent, but "the 1978 seizures which originated in Thailand, while still prepared in the form of sticks, showed a dramatic decrease in THC level compared with previous years", and the laboratory found "an increasing seed content in the cannabis"; the Thai mean for 1978 was 3.9 per cent. A second survey found considerable improvement in Thai material between 1979 and 1981. Citing the botanist Robert Connell Clarke's Marijuana Botany (1981), the laboratory's staff added that "Thai sticks were originally both of high quality and seedless, but that more recently large quantities of much lower grade Cannabis were being marketed".

Maguire and Ritter describe the decline from the trade's side: brokers "were wrapping such bad pot onto sticks that consumers no longer wanted Thai sticks", and in one season of shortage, made worse by raids, they "scrambled to find whatever they could, even immature leaf and stem with no buds at all".^: 127 They quote a 1982 article in High Times, which they call its "epitaph for the Thai stick", on "what has become a welcome staple: pressed stickless Thai".^: 207 In the same year a series in The Sacramento Bee, reprinted in the Congressional Record, called Thai weed "the most popular smoke in California" and put its wholesale price at $1,200 a pound.^: 24617 The intelligence estimate for 1983 wrote that Thai marijuana "frequently appears in the United States in the form of expensive Thai sticks", but that demand for "this specialty product is limited and may even decline as use of domestic sinsemilla increases".^: 12 The State Department reported in 1986 that Thai marijuana "is often compressed into bales or cans" for the journey to the coast. The Drug Enforcement Administration's handbook, which had described South-East Asian Thai sticks in 1979 as "encountered infrequently on the U.S. illicit market", repeated the description in 1988.^: 37: 45

Chouvy writes that the success in the United States "of the highly potent and expensive Thai cannabis" most likely gave growers there an economic reason to produce sinsemilla at home, and that the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, "stricter regulations in both Thailand and the United States" and the spraying of Mexican fields disrupted imports and favoured local production in North America.^{: para. 13} Maguire and Ritter date the shutting down of "the export Thai marijuana trade" to the 1980s; by the early 1990s, they write, "the Thai marijuana fleet had been mothballed", and they count the Drug Enforcement Administration's campaign against Thai marijuana among "the few unequivocal victories in the War on Drugs".^: 172 They describe the seizure on 10 June 1988 of the mother ship Encounter Bay, "one of eight mother ships captured by the Coast Guard in 1988, for a total haul of 463,000 pounds of Southeast Asian marijuana".^: 172 In New Zealand, Newbold writes, imported cannabis gave way to domestic growing in the early 1980s.^: 291–292 In Australia, Jiggens quotes a Sydney NORML newsletter of 1984 that priced "Buddha" at about $300 an ounce, glossed in his quotation as "compressed sinsemilla, reputedly from Thailand, though rumoured to be from North Queensland".^: 150

Thai cannabis as breeding stock

Seed from Thai cannabis was grown abroad from the early 1970s. Chouvy, citing Clarke and Merlin, writes that in the early 1970s growers in North America and Europe "crossed a Mexican landrace with landraces from Colombia, Jamaica, Thailand, and India, and started producing sinsemilla".^{: para. 12} The National Institute on Drug Abuse's terminology guide of 1982 wrote that seedless cultivation "has been used in Asia for centuries and is, for example, used to grow the marijuana contained in Thai sticks", and that its use in the West "was popularized after the drug experiences of American soldiers in Vietnam in the 1960s".^: 86 A scientific group of the World Health Organization reported in 1972 that seed from Mexico and Thailand "produced plants with a high content (1.5-2.0%)" of Δ9-THC. The Laboratory of the Government Chemist grew plants in Britain from seed taken from Thai seizures; their first generation was low in THC and the second much higher, and the study was abandoned in 1981, when the crop "did not produce any male plants". A New Zealand business newspaper wrote in 1998 that "Most New Zealand cannabis seeds originated from the 'buddha sticks' imported in bulk from Thailand by Marty Johnstone and his Mr Asia syndicate in the late 1970s", a claim quoted by Green's Dictionary of Slang. The botanists John McPartland and Ernest Small write that "Central Asian landraces were introduced into South Asian centers of diversity in the 1970s", naming Thailand among them.

The British laboratory found that Thai material normally contained "only THC and THC acid. No CBD and negligible THV", while at a Japanese–American research meeting in 1972 Nobuo Ikekawa reported that marihuana "from a Meo village, northern Thailand, contained high concentrations of THCV and CBDV". In McPartland's account of vernacular usage, "Sativa" denotes narrow-leafleted, tall, late-maturing plants "typified by plants from India and their descendants in Thailand, South and East Africa, Colombia, and Mexico". A study of 372 samples of cannabis grown in northern Thailand found landrace plants at their traditional harvest time with 0.874 to 1.480 per cent THC by dry weight, and classed most landrace and trial-field plants as of an intermediate chemical type.

In Thailand since 2019

A landrace cannabis field in the Phu Phan hills above Kut Bak, Sakon Nakhon, January 2025.

Mr Krabangkham with a branch of his "Squirrel Tail" selection in Sakon Nakhon, November 2024.

Thailand amended its narcotics law in February 2019 to allow the medical use of cannabis, and the Ministry of Public Health removed cannabis and hemp plants from the list of Category 5 narcotics by a notification of 8 February 2022 that took effect on 9 June 2022. The ministry listed cannabis as a controlled herb in June 2022 and confined the listing to the flower that November. A notification of June 2025 replaced that one and barred sale of the flower without a prescription, except between licence holders.

In 2019, before delisting, the narcotics control office destroyed 26 illicit cannabis plots found by helicopter survey in the valleys of Kudbak district in Sakon Nakhon, an area that Matichon called the largest growing area in Thailand.

In 2021 the Department of Medical Sciences and Rajamangala University of Technology Isan applied to the Department of Agriculture to register four Thai cultivars, and by January 2022 the department listed five registered cannabis cultivars, among them Hang Kra Rog Phu Phan ST1. Hang Kra Rog refers to inflorescences that "resemble the tail of a squirrel", and Phu Phan is the range in Sakon Nakhon and Kalasin provinces. The application describes Hang Kra Rog Phu Phan as a kind of Thai cannabis that has existed since ancient times around the Phu Phan range, and states that the registered line, with roughly equal THC and CBD, was selected over three generations from seed declared under the 2019 amnesty, after comparison with descriptions given by village sages and folk doctors in Sakon Nakhon. A 2023 analysis of flower sold as Hang Kra Rog Phu Phan found 7.29 to 12.70 per cent THC and 0.11 to 0.73 per cent CBD, and noted the difference from the registered description. A 2022 release of the Department of Medical Sciences described the four cultivars as unused for more than 40 years before the department collected them, and their registration as showing that Thai cannabis is of good quality and part of the national heritage. A whole-genome study published in 2025 found Hang Kra Rog Phu Phan unexpectedly close to the CBD-dominant cultivar "CBD Shark".

In recent Thai research the English name has been given to living plants: a 2025 study from the Sakon Nakhon campus of Rajamangala University of Technology Isan calls its material "Thai stick cannabis, also known as Hang Kra Rog Phu Phan", and a 2024 study of antioxidant activity uses "Thai Stick" as the name of the Thai strain it compared with an imported hybrid. Sommano and colleagues, writing in 2022, describe Thailand as "noted for developing the unique technique for ganja growing that produces thick inflorescences dense to the stem known as 'Thai sticks'", and a physician's recollection published by Matichon in 2022 glossed the English name in Thai as kancha siap mai (กัญชาเสียบไม้), cannabis on a skewer. Growers in Sakon Nakhon told The Nation in 2024 that their stock lay unsold and that investors were importing foreign strains to sell at higher prices than "the Thai strain" they grew.

See also

• Cannabis cultivation
• Cannabis in Thai traditional medicine
• Charas
• Ganja
• Hashish
• Landrace Cannabis
• Laos
• Northeastern Thailand
• Phu Phan
• Sinsemilla
• Thailand
• United States and cannabis eradication abroad