The health minister who ushered in legal weed and now wants to be prime minister took a tough-on-drugs position last night that represented a sharp reversal of the slow-moving push to wind down Thailand’s destructive war on drugs.
Anutin Charnvirakul’s vow to enact harsh penalties for those who even possess small amounts of meth and prosecute anyone with two or more tablets as a drug dealer would undo a seven-year effort to replace zero-tolerance dtrrug policies with those based on common sense.
Anutin has taken equal parts credit and heat as the public face of legal weed. Now, with an election looming in which he hopes to lead his Bhumjaithai Party to victory and be named premier, his attempt to assuage weed-wary voters with an easy sound bite is based on poorly conceived and backward policy.
It’s far from what the original proponent of legalization, former…
