After closing the Agential Cannabis conference in Bangkok last month, Stephen Murphy, founder and CEO of Prohibition Partners, considers how medicinal cannabis in the Asia-Pacific region is taking shape and what will determine leadership in the region over the next five years.
The Asia-Pacific region is often described as the next big opportunity for medicinal cannabis, as though it were a single market waiting to open. After several months preparing my keynote speech for Agential Cannabis 2026 and a week on the ground in Thailand, I am convinced that framing is the first thing investors and operators should set aside.
There is no single APAC market. There are at least five distinct regulatory models. Australia and New Zealand run prescription access at scale. Meanwhile, Thailand is moving from rapid liberalisation to a strictly medical framework.
Japan and South Korea have pharmaceutical pathways rather than dispensaries. India combines research, traditional medicine and state law with nothing yet binding them together. The remaining markets range from active debate to firm prohibition.
These markets do not even measure themselves in the same way. Australia reports units sold, New Zealand reports packs supplied, Thailand counts licensed shops and Japan counts approved medicines, of which there are none. A region without a common unit of measurement cannot yet be assessed as one market and should not be invested in as one.
A familiar pattern
What is happening across the region is not new. Germany granted prescription access in 2017, years before its pharmacies, doctors and import supply chains were ready, and volumes only scaled after a second change in the law in 2024. Canada’s legalisation in 2018 drew in capital far faster than its retail network could absorb it. Colombia positioned itself as a low-cost export hub in 2016, yet its exports were worth around US$10.8m seven years later.
The lesson from each is the same. Legislation opens a market, but it cannot build one. The work that follows on clinical integration, supply chains, compliance and data takes far longer, and it is that work that determines who succeeds.
How does the region look today?
Australia remains the region’s most developed market, and its most instructive. Prescribing pathways and telehealth took it to 6.59 million units in 2024. In the second half of 2025, sales fell 28.5% year on year, the first material decline since the access scheme began.
The causes were structural. Prescribing had become heavily concentrated, with eight doctors each issuing more than 10,000 scripts in six months, spurning an ongoing regulatory crackdown. Prices have since fallen, with median flower now below A$10 a gram, and the industry has begun to consolidate. The merger of LGP and Cannatrek, announced in January, followed Cann Group’s restructuring of 81% of its debt.
Australia also shows how integrated regional supply already is. It now imports significantly more cannabis than it grows. In 2025, it imported 81.1 tonnes, but grew just 55.3 tonnes domestically over the same period. Imports of Thai medical flower rose nineteenfold in a single year. Product is moving across borders considerably faster than the systems designed to verify it.
Elsewhere, progress is slower and more cautious. New Zealand has prioritised quality over scale, but its only public metric, packs supplied, cannot be converted into a count of patients, as its own Ministry of Health acknowledges.
Japan reformed its law in 2023 and has yet to approve a cannabis-derived medicine, although Jazz Pharmaceuticals and Nippon Zoki agreed in April to bring Epidyolex to market. South Korea still dispenses four imported medicines through a single channel in Seoul. India has four states licensing cultivation, but no route yet connects that activity to patients.
Strategic capital is watching, but at a distance. Of the five largest tobacco companies, two have a confirmed presence in the region, both through investee companies rather than in their own names. Among the major pharmaceutical groups, only Jazz has staked its claim.
What Thailand revealed
Thailand provided the clearest view of where the region is heading. Four observations from the week stand out.
The first concerns production. Chinese influence is becoming visible in the scale and production processes of Thai facilities. At the same time, developed markets are investing in automated cultivation at an industrial scale, as evidenced by Austranna’s five-hectare glasshouse facility in Queensland. Together, these trends point to significant disruption in the regional supply chain. Large, efficient production sites will lower costs, and the price compression already evident in Australia is likely to spread. Producers built around premium, small batch cultivation will find that model increasingly difficult to sustain.
The second concerns export routes. Most Thai producers are focused on export, and those reaching Europe are largely doing so indirectly, through Australia, the Czech Republic and Switzerland. The reason is regulatory. Thailand has 282 GACP accredited cultivation sources across 50 provinces and has exported 2.5bn baht of cannabis and hemp products to 31 countries, but it has no mutual recognition agreement with the EU.
Every batch reaching a European patient must be released by a qualified person at the importing manufacturer, and German regulators are tightening the standards those batches must meet. Cultivation capacity is not the constraint. Access to European compliance is.
The third concerns what was absent. The conference looked almost entirely outward, towards export markets, with little attention paid to Thailand’s own patients. Few companies are investing in the infrastructure and clinical capacity a domestic medical market requires, and there are few new entrants focused on building it.
Many of the businesses that emerged during the period of liberalisation are under visible strain. The risk is that the first generation of operators exhausts itself before a second generation arrives to build the medical market properly.
In late June 2025, days after the Bhumjaithai Party left the governing coalition, the Public Health Minister signed an order making a prescription mandatory for cannabis flower. On 22 September, two days before I spoke, the Cabinet approved a Cannabis and Hemp Control bill that would confine dispensing to medical settings under the supervision of doctors. It now moves through the legislative process.
Basic market information remains difficult to establish. The Ministry of Public Health’s figures show licensed shops falling from a peak of 18,517 to 11,386 by April. The live dashboard maintained by the Department of Thai Traditional and Alternative Medicine showed around 9,700 in September. Each uses a different method and a different date, and they cannot be reconciled.
Cenk Cetin, who operates a cannabis business in Thailand and briefed us extensively before the event, provided a closer view. One Bangkok shop’s monthly flower sales halved between November 2025 and August 2026. Consultation records from 379 patients at the Cannabox clinic show that people seek treatment primarily for insomnia, anxiety, chronic pain and depression. The demand for a medical market is real. The capacity to serve it is not yet in place.
The clearest measure of that gap is prescribing. In 2025, some 192,559 professionals in Thailand were eligible to prescribe cannabis. According to the department’s own figures, around 3,693 had been trained to issue the patient order on which the medical system now depends, equating to just 1.9%. As Cetin put it: “The next shop should know whether PT33 was used, or what the last shop dispensed.” At present, it cannot.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly for the future of the region, Japan, India and others are looking to Thailand for guidance as they develop their own frameworks. However, there is a substantial gap between what Thailand has learned and what its neighbours understand of it. Thailand has, in effect, conducted the region’s experiment in real time. Its lessons are available, but they are not yet being systematically shared.
The structural factors
Legal status explains little about which markets will succeed. Four structural factors explain considerably more.
Demographics shape demand. Nearly 30 per cent of Japan’s population is over 65, compared with 5.5 per cent in the Philippines. An older population brings the chronic pain, sleep disorders and palliative needs that account for most medical use.
Affordability shapes access. GDP per capita ranges from around US$95,000 to around US$2,600 in India. Outside a small number of registered pharmaceuticals, patients across the region pay privately, so income determines access as much as law does.
Institutional stability shapes investment. Thailand has changed its operating rules repeatedly in four years, often in step with changes in its governing coalition. Regulators in Australia and Japan move more slowly but predictably. For long-term capital, predictability matters more than liberality.
Administrative capacity shapes delivery. A framework is only as effective as the prescribers, inspectors, laboratories and data systems available to operate it. Thailand’s 1.9% is the starkest example, but the pattern recurs across the region.
What will determine leadership by 2031?
The industry in Asia-Pacific is moving from a phase of market entry to one of market leadership, and the criteria for success are changing accordingly. As with the structural factors, I see four developments that will shape the next five years in the region.
Evidence will become the basis of competition. Regulators, investors and clinicians now expect verified data rather than claims, and Australia’s correction shows what happens when the two diverge.
Verification will become a source of advantage. The first jurisdiction to connect consultation, prescription and dispensing in a single auditable record will set the standard against which the rest of the region is measured.
Production will industrialise. Automated cultivation at scale, supported by Chinese process capability in some markets and substantial capital investment in others, will lower prices across the region. Competitiveness will depend on cost, consistency and compliance.
Trade will follow compliance. Product that cannot satisfy European release requirements will not reach European patients, regardless of where or how cheaply it was grown.
None of this is primarily a question of geography. Across the Asia-Pacific, governments have legislated for access before building the systems needed to support it. Thailand has gone further along that path than any of its neighbours, and they are watching closely. If the region is to avoid repeating its more difficult lessons, it will need to close the knowledge gap as deliberately as it opened access. Over the next five years, the advantage will lie with those who build the data, verification and domestic medical infrastructure that turn legal permission into a functioning market.
