Medical Cannabis
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You are standing outside a cannabis shop in Bangkok. Green neon, a leaf on the door, jars glowing behind the glass. It looks exactly like the shop next door, and the one across the road. Which of them is actually allowed to sell to you?
Here is the quick way to do a dispensary licence check in Thailand. Look for the coloured licence sticker at the entrance, read the shop name and the eight digit establishment code on it, then search the shop on the ThaiCannaMapped Dispensary Register. If the sticker is missing, or the shop is not on the register, walk on.
That takes about a minute. It is the most useful minute you will spend on a cannabis trip to Thailand, and after 900+ dispensary visits I can tell you most people skip it.
In the open era you could buy from almost anyone and the worst outcome was bad weed. That changed.
Since June 2025 cannabis flower has been a controlled herb, and only a licensed shop may sell it, and only to someone with a prescription from a Thai licensed practitioner. Then the shakeout came. About 18,500 shops were ever licensed in Thailand. Roughly 7,100 closed in 2025 after failing to renew, leaving about 11,400 operating by April 2026.
Enforcement followed. By late May 2026 officials had inspected 9,158 shops nationwide, 2,175 of them in Bangkok. They suspended 2,149 licences, revoked 418 and prosecuted 394 cases.
Put those numbers together and you get the uncomfortable truth: a shop that was licensed when someone wrote a review about it may not be licensed today. Old blog posts, old Google reviews and old directories all lag behind. The sticker and the register are how you check the present.
Every licensed shop is supposed to display a licence sticker on its shopfront. It carries two things you can check and one you can read at a glance.
The shop name. It should match the business you are standing in front of. A sticker in one name on a shop trading under another is worth a question.
The eight digit establishment code. This is the shop's identifier on the official licence system. Note it, or take a photo.
The colour. The colour tells you when the licence expires:
A red sticker is not a warning in itself. It simply means the licence is coming up for renewal sooner, and the shop will need to meet the newer requirements to keep it. Late in the year, a red sticker is a good reason to double check the register.
No sticker at all is the red flag. A licensed shop has every reason to show it, and failing to display the licence clearly can itself earn a shop a 30 day suspension. A shop without one is either unlicensed, lapsed, or careless, and none of those is who you want selling you a controlled herb.
Stickers can be old, copied or simply peeled off a closed shop's window. So confirm.
The ThaiCannaMapped Dispensary Register maps every licensed dispensary in Thailand from the official register. You can search it three ways:
By name. Type the shop name. Be flexible: many shops are registered under the owner's company name, often in Thai, rather than the brand on the sign.
By province or area. Useful when you only know roughly where the shop is, or when you want to see which licensed shops are near your hotel before you head out.
By licence status. So you can see whether a licence is still active rather than just whether it once existed.
If the shop is not there, or the licence is not active, that is your answer. I built the register for exactly this moment: you, on a street corner, deciding whether to walk in. Bookmark it before you fly.
A sticker and a register entry tell you the licence exists. The rules that came in with Ministerial Regulation No. 2 in April 2026 tell you what a compliant shop should look like inside. To sell flower, a licensee must now meet all of these:
A second qualifying credential. The shop needs a licence that ties it to health or herbal medicine, such as a clinic or healthcare licence, a herbal product licence, a drug licence, a category 5 extract licence, or folk healer certification. The name, address and hours on that credential must match the cannabis licence.
Written consent from the owner of the premises. You will not see this one, but it is part of why some shops closed.
Proper storage. Flower kept separated and off the floor, not in boxes behind the counter.
Odour and smoke control. An elimination system, which is one reason the old lounge style of shop is fading.
A trained staff member on every shift. At least one person on duty, every shift, who has completed the Department of Thai Traditional and Alternative Medicine training. Ask who it is. A good shop will tell you.
One correction to something you will read everywhere online: the regulation does not require a doctor on site. Some shops have a practitioner in house who can write your prescription, others work with a nearby clinic. The draft Cannabis Control Act would push shops toward a medical facility model with a doctor, but that is not law yet. I wrote about where this is heading in Thailand didn't ban weed, it turned dispensaries into clinics.
A shop can have a valid sticker and still be cutting corners. These are the behaviours that tell you more than the paperwork.
They ask for your prescription. Or they offer a proper consultation for a PT33. A shop that sells you flower without one is breaking the rule that keeps it open. Selling without a prescription carries a 90 day licence suspension. If you do not have a PT33 yet, my PT33 guide shows how to get one.
They check your age. The legal age is 20, and selling to anyone under 20, to students, or to pregnant or breastfeeding women can get a licence revoked.
They do not invite you to smoke inside. Allowing smoking on the premises is a revocation offence now. A shop still running an indoor smoking room is gambling with its licence, and you are standing in the middle of the bet. Consumption belongs in a private space, and I cover the options in where you can actually smoke in Bangkok.
They do not sell online or by delivery. Online and electronic sales are banned, and so are vending machines. A shop pushing a delivery number or a website checkout is outside the system.
They do not push THC edibles, vapes or concentrates. Extracts above 0.2% THC are category 5 narcotics, and Thailand bans e-cigarette devices. CBD products under the 0.2% line are a different matter. The breakdown is in edibles vs flower vs vapes.
There is no advertising. All cannabis advertising is banned. A shop handing out flyers, running promotions or paying touts to pull you off the street is breaking that rule in plain sight.
Thailand has also barred sales at temples, dormitories, parks, zoos, amusement parks, street stalls and mobile trailers. A cart on the pavement selling joints is not a licensed shop, however official it looks.
The penalty scale, as reported in June 2026, gives you a sense of what the authorities care about most:
Selling without any licence at all is a criminal matter under the Thai Traditional Medicine Knowledge Act, with up to one year in prison and a fine of up to 20,000 baht. Suspended licensees may also be refused renewal later. More on how penalties land on shops and customers in cannabis penalties in Thailand.
Before you walk in, run through this:
If all five pass, you are very likely in a licensed shop. Quality is a separate question, and I wrote a whole post on how to find a good dispensary in Bangkok.
How do I check if a cannabis shop in Thailand is licensed? Read the licence sticker at the entrance, then search the shop by name or area on the ThaiCannaMapped Dispensary Register, which is mapped from the official register.
What do the sticker colours mean? Red expires at the end of this year, yellow at the end of next year, and green is valid for longer.
Does a licensed dispensary need a doctor on site? Not under the current regulation. It needs a trained staff member on every shift and a second qualifying credential. Some shops have a prescribing practitioner in house, others do not.
Is it my problem if the shop is unlicensed? You lose the protection of having bought legally, and you have no PT33 and receipt from a licensed seller to show if questioned. Buy from licensed shops only.
Licensed shops are the whole point of the new system. They are the only ones that can sell to you legally, and in my experience the ones that survived the shakeout are generally the better shops too. The overview of how buying works end to end is in my guide to weed in Bangkok, and my ranking of the shops I trust most is in the best weed shops in Bangkok.
If you would rather skip the checking altogether, my Certified Bangkok list is 40+ shops that passed every test, free by email from the curated list page. Licences change, so a quick look at the register before you go is still worth it.
I keep documenting licence stickers and shop changes on Instagram, including the shops that quietly disappeared after inspections. Operators and growers compare notes on the new licensing rules inside Reefers Club, an invite only community of people in the Thai cannabis industry. And for licensed shops that want customers to find them without breaking the advertising ban, that is the marketing and content work I do.
Sticker first. Register second. Then go and enjoy it.
Written by someone who has read more licence stickers on more Bangkok doors than is probably healthy.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Licensing rules and licence status change, so always confirm a shop's current status before you buy. Legal purchase requires a PT33 prescription. Adults 20+ only.
