Your first visit to a dispensary in Pattaya

What to have in your pocket

• Passport — the physical one, not a photograph and not a hotel photocopy.
• The original prescription document, if you hold one.
• The address written down or the map pin saved, so a driver can be shown rather than told.
• A rough idea of what you want to talk about — an aroma, a time of day, a style rather than a name.
• Patience for the document check; it happens before the conversation, every time.

Getting to the door without the usual detour

Practical caution — not a legal conclusion

The shop sits in a numbered alley off the main road in South Pattaya, and numbered alleys are how this city navigates. Drivers know them; they do not know shop names, and there is no reason they should — the city has several hundred cannabis counters and no driver has learned the list.

So say the alley, not the sign, and show the map pin on your screen. The pin ends the conversation faster than any attempt at pronunciation and, more usefully, puts you at the correct end of the street. Alleys here have two ends, and arriving at the wrong one turns a short arrival into a walk in the sun.

If you are already in the alley and cannot see the sign, send a message rather than walking its length twice. Somebody will talk you in from where you are standing, which takes about a minute.

At the door: age, identity, paperwork

Practical caution — not a legal conclusion

The first thing that happens is a document check, and it happens before anything is discussed. Twenty and over, without exceptions and without judgement calls about how old somebody looks. A passport for visitors, a Thai identity card for residents. The prescription in its original form.

The details get written down. That is not curiosity: a licensed counter keeps records of what it sells and to whom, and those records are part of what the licence requires. Anybody who finds that surprising has probably been in a shop that does not keep them, which is a different kind of business with a different relationship to the rules.

If a document is missing, the visit ends politely at that point. It is worth checking by message beforehand rather than discovering it after crossing the city in the afternoon heat.

At the counter: how the conversation actually goes

Practical caution — not a legal conclusion

Jars are opened in front of you. You are meant to look and to smell — that is the entire point of buying flower over a counter rather than sight unseen, and nobody is offended by a customer taking their time over it. Ask when it was trimmed and how it has been stored; both are fair questions and both have real answers.

The useful way to open the conversation is with a direction rather than a name: something bright or something heavy, something for a slow evening or for a walk along the beach, an aroma you liked last time. Strain names travel badly — the same name covers very different plants depending on who grew them — and a name repeated from a website tells the person behind the counter much less than one honest sentence about what you actually enjoyed.

Questions that get you nowhere in writing: anything that amounts to a price list, and anything asking to hold an item until later. Neither can be answered by message, and neither improves by being asked twice. Haggling is not part of how a licensed counter works either; it is a shop with records, not a market stall.

Etiquette that is not obvious the first time

Practical caution — not a legal conclusion

Nothing is consumed on the premises. This is a shop, not a lounge; there is no seating and no smoking area, and asking for one puts staff in an awkward position over something they cannot grant.

Do not photograph other customers, and ask before photographing anything else. Plenty of visitors here would rather not appear in someone else's holiday album, and the counter has the same instinct about its own paperwork.

Do not ask anyone to sell to you on behalf of a friend who stayed at the hotel. The sale is to the person standing there with the documents, and passing it on afterwards is a separate problem that belongs to whoever does it.

After you leave

Practical caution — not a legal conclusion

Keep what you bought in the packaging it left in, with the label on it. The label is the thing that connects what you are carrying to a licensed sale, and it costs nothing to keep.

Where consumption is allowed is narrower than most visitors assume: public places, beaches, streets and hotel balconies are not the neutral ground they look like, and complaints from neighbours are the usual way a quiet evening becomes an official one. The legal guide on this site goes through the rules with the government sources attached.

And the last one, which catches people at the end of a holiday rather than at the start: what you bought stays in Thailand. Taking cannabis out of the country is a customs matter, not a shopping one, and the fact that a purchase was lawful here changes nothing at a departure gate. Empty your bag before you pack it, not at the airport.

First-visit questions