Thailand Cannabis and Hemp Act 2026: A Live Tracker for Exporters and Licensed Buyers

Where the Law Stands Right Now

LAST UPDATED: JULY 29, 2026

The Thailand Cannabis and Hemp Act 2026 draft, renamed in mid-2026 as the draft Cannabis Control Act, has not passed. Ministerial regulations, not the Act, govern Thai cannabis today, and the table below tracks every instrument that matters to licensed buyers and exporters.

Thailand is regulating cannabis through ministerial regulations while the Act waits. If you are a licensed buyer, plan against the Thailand cannabis regulations already in force in 2026, not the draft.

Timeline: June 2025 Recriminalization to Today

The Two April 2026 Ministerial Regulations, Explained

Extract regulation (effective April 26): Thai-majority ownership for high-THC licences

The extract regulation narrows what cannabis and hemp extracts above 0.2% THC may lawfully be used for: medical use, medical and scientific research, industrial use, and government narcotics-suppression work; and restricts who may hold high-THC extract licences: Thai juristic persons not classified as foreign under the Foreign Business Act, government agencies, and the Thai Red Cross Society. Foreign-majority companies are effectively excluded from holding these licences. This regulation governs extracts, not flower, but it signals the direction of travel: purpose-limited licensing, Thai-controlled ownership, and tighter control of the supply chain.

Flower regulation (published April 30, effective on publication): premises, storage and DTAM-trained staff

Ministerial Regulation No. 2 raises the bar for flower export, sale and processing licences. Applicants must show lawful ownership or possessory rights over their premises (with written owner consent if leased), dedicated storage that preserves product quality, qualified medical, pharmaceutical or cultivation personnel, odor and smoke elimination systems, and at least one DTAM-trained staff member present throughout operating hours. Each requirement translates into a due-diligence question a buyer can ask today, starting with the simplest: who is your DTAM-trained officer, and can you show the premises and storage documentation behind your licence? A GACP-certified cannabis supplier in Thailand will already hold documented answers to all of these.

New DTAM penalty guidelines: suspension and revocation risk

Since June 22, 2026, the Department of Thai Traditional and Alternative Medicine applies published penalty guidelines: 30-day suspensions for minor breaches such as record-keeping and licence-display failures, 90-day suspensions for serious ones, including selling without a prescription and unreported exports, and immediate revocation for repeat or severe violations. For buyers, the practical consequence is that a non-compliant supplier can now lose its licence mid-contract. Supplier compliance history has become a supply-continuity issue, not a formality.

Export Filing Goes Digital: DTAM Next and the Customs Single Window

On June 24, 2026 the Department of Thai Traditional and Alternative Medicine announced that it is preparing to connect its DTAM Next portal to the Customs Department’s National Single Window, the central channel through which Thailand exchanges standardised export data. The stated goal is to let licensed exporters file the Por Thor 32 form, the per-shipment notification of controlled-herb export details, electronically, with the data passing automatically to Customs instead of moving as paper between two agencies. The announcement was relayed by the Government Public Relations Department on June 27 and picked up widely in the Thai and English press.

Read the verbs carefully, because the headlines did not. The Thai wording throughout is เตรียมเชื่อมต่อ, “preparing to connect”, and operator capability is stated conditionally: once the linkage is complete, exporters will be able to file electronically. As of this update there is no go-live date, no pilot cohort, no Royal Gazette instrument authorising electronic Por Thor 32 filing, and no public confirmation from the Customs Department. English-language coverage describing a “launch” is softer on status than the Thai original.

What this changes for a licensed exporter today: nothing. The export licence requirement is entirely unaffected: this is a filing mechanism, not a licensing change, and no source suggests any relaxation or automatic grant of the underlying licence. Por Thor 32 continues to be filed on paper.

The efficiency figures now circulating are DTAM’s own projections for a system that is not yet running, and should not be built into buyer-facing lead times. DTAM says it currently issues roughly 100–200 Por Thor 32 forms a month, and expects the linkage to cut processing from about five to seven working days to one to two once complete. Plan shipment timelines on the current five-to-seven-day basis until the system demonstrably operates.

The context figure quoted alongside the announcement is worth keeping in proportion: Thailand’s cumulative licensed controlled-herb exports were given as more than 201,658 kilogrammes, with no stated start date or measurement period. It is a cumulative total, not an annual one.

One consequence does deserve attention. Electronic filing that feeds Customs directly makes export declarations easier to reconcile against licence records, and under the DTAM penalty guidelines in force since June 22, 2026, failure to report export details already carries a 90-day licence suspension, with revocation available for false reporting. A supplier whose paperwork does not survive that kind of matching is a supply-continuity risk regardless of which channel the form travels through.

Thailand Cannabis Licence Expiry: The December 31, 2026 Cliff

The extract regulation’s transition clause gives Category 5 licences issued under the prior 2020 hemp and 2021 cannabis regulations a hard sunset: they remain valid only until December 31, 2026, and renewal means full re-qualification under the 2026 framework, including the Thai-ownership test. Consultancy estimates (DeeMED) put re-qualification at roughly four to six months with documentation in order. The arithmetic is unforgiving: an operator that had not started re-qualifying by mid-2026 is at real risk of a licence gap in early 2027. Dispensary and controlled-herb licences run on their own renewal schedules: a further 4,587 expire during 2026 and 5,210 in 2027, so the operator pool will keep shrinking either way.

The certified core is already small. As of February 13, 2026, DTAM counted just 217 GACP-certified farms against more than 11,800 licensed operators: under 2% hold the minimum certification the export pathway assumes, up from around 149 farms in late 2025. Understanding what GACP certification actually requires explains why the number is so low.

Cannabis and Hemp Act Thailand: Status of the Draft and What It Says

A note on the name. This bill was renamed in mid-2026. It began as the draft Cannabis and Hemp Act (ร่าง พ.ร.บ. กัญชา กัญชง) and is now the draft Cannabis Control Act (ร่างพระราชบัญญัติควบคุมกัญชา พ.ศ. ….): “control” was added and “hemp” was dropped from the title, though the bill still regulates hemp and still creates a national cannabis and hemp committee. It is the same instrument: same drafting agency, same hearing series, same Cabinet mandate, so either name leads to the same bill. Thai-language documents now use the new title only, which matters if you are searching Thai sources.

The Public Health Ministry’s draft would put Thailand’s medical-only policy into primary legislation. Its known direction, claim by claim:

Cannabis outlets would operate as medical facilities, with doctors supervising dispensing, a requirement that already applies in part under amended ministerial regulations in force today.

The supply chain would come under source-to-destination controls, and registered outlets would be listed publicly with GPS-pinned locations.

New operators would be limited to hospitals, pharmacies and licensed herbal-product shops, and police and local officials would gain enforcement powers equivalent to health officials.

A crackdown is already under way on more than 6,000 shops operating illegally or on expired licences.

Where the bill stands: second-phase public hearings closed on July 1, 2026, drawing more than 1,600 responses, and a third round ran July 3–17, adding 153 more. On July 20, 2026 the Department of Thai Traditional and Alternative Medicine announced the draft was complete and had been submitted to the Public Health Minister for consideration, four days ahead of its own July 24 target. Submission is not approval: nothing published shows the Minister has signed it off, and the next formal step is Cabinet approval in principle.

The field is no longer a one-bill race: a rival, stricter bill was filed in Parliament on July 9, and the House Public Health Committee is drafting its own companion bill, with parliamentary consideration expected in January 2027 at the earliest.

No passage date exists. Anyone quoting one is guessing. This section will be rewritten the day the bill moves; that is what this tracker is for.

What This Means for Licensed Buyers of Thai Flower

Every move above points the same way: Thailand is dismantling the recreational market while deliberately preserving the licensed medical and export channel. Enforcement now cuts hard against the informal route: unlicensed bud exports are charged under Section 244 of the Customs Act with penalties up to 10 years, and authorities cite roughly 56 tonnes seized in fiscal 2026, with the UK and the Netherlands as the top illicit destinations. The only durable way to move Thai flower across a border is with a Thailand cannabis export licence issued under the 2026 framework.

Demand-side fundamentals are intact. Germany imported 201 tonnes of medical cannabis in 2025 (+176% year on year) and 50.5 tonnes in Q1 2026; our guide to how Thai GACP flower reaches German pharmacies covers the full picture, including the §4 MedCanG licence, §72 AMG import licence and per-shipment §12 MedCanG permits, plus release against the European Pharmacopoeia Cannabis flower monograph, a chain Thai rule changes do not touch, along with the regulatory watch items on the German side.

A note on price signals: Thailand’s domestic oversupply has pushed some local wholesale offers far below export-grade levels. That surplus cannot enter the export channel: without GACP certification and a valid export licence it has no legal route across the border, so domestic pricing tells you nothing about import-grade sourcing. For the certified market, see our published Thailand cannabis wholesale prices for 2026, and our overview of what licensed buyers need to purchase cannabis wholesale in Thailand.

What Stays True for GACP-Certified Export

Every new requirement in the 2026 framework (lawful premises, dedicated storage, qualified personnel, trained staff, traceability) is a subset of what dual certification already demands. Solar Farm holds Thai GACP and EU-GACP certification, is commissioning in-house HPLC potency testing, and issues a third-party certificate of analysis for every batch, and operates 22 flowering rooms across 5,800 m² of indoor facility whose SOPs, from air-locks to visitor management, you can inspect in our room-by-room compliance walkthrough. We have supplied a licensed German buyer under partnership since 2025. The documentation the new rules demand is documentation we already maintain daily. Tightening rules shrink the pool of certified exporters; they do not shrink the export market.

How and When We Update This Tracker

The “Last updated” date at the top changes with every revision, and each change is logged below. We review this page monthly and update it within 48 hours of any Royal Gazette publication, Cabinet or parliamentary action on the Act, or DTAM guideline change.

If you are a licensed buyer or importer doing diligence on Thai supply, we will walk you through our licence, certification and re-qualification status directly: contact our export team.

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