I don’t know why anyone thinks they can get away with smoking pot in Thailand. Ignore the pot tee-shirts and the Rastafarian flags. Getting high on grass is against the law and in many cases a scam. Smiling dealers sell ganja to unsuspecting foreigners and then rat out the potheads to the cops.

If you don’t have enough to pay for justice then you’ll discover that the local prisons’ notoriety for a lack of hospitality is not unfounded.

Embassies advise tourists not to even think about smoking pot. Books and movies have been made about the Bangkok Hilton or Pattaya’s Soi 9 Arms.

You’d think that herb aficionados would have gotten the message and at least be discreet while tuffing a spliff.

No way, dude.

They don’t call it dope for nothing.

Typical example of potheaded raison d’duh. 

On Wednesday night Pattaya Police on beach Road smelled burning ganja. Which is pretty good considering the stench of diesel clouding the strip. They observed four men, two Thais and two Nordic tourists smoking what appeared to be cigarettes. On closer inspection they discovered that the smokers had camouflaged their herb in filtered cigarettes.

A smart subterfuge, except now all four were charged with a class 5 drug offense. End of vacation and it happens all the time.

Personally I believe marijuana should be legalized worldwide.

How dangerous is it?

Zero people died from pot ODs last year, while over 10 million succumbed to tobacco-related diseases, yet you don’t see the police breaking down the door of JR Reynolds. No one is building a memorial for that year-after year holocaust either. Big Tobacco pays for its power. But this isn’t about legal versus illegal.

Those two tourists will be lucky if they get deported to their home countries.

The Thais will do a couple of months.

All because they thought they were smart.

And they were for a couple of minutes.

In a related incident a young waitress asked if I knew what dope meant.

I said, “Either ngao for idiot or ganja.”

“No, fish. Dopin”

“You mean dolphin?”

“Can you eat dolphin?” She looked over her shoulder at a table of fat German men.

“Dolphin? You mean like Flipper?” No one her age in Thailand has seen that TV show, which means it time to remake it in Hollywood. “Dolphin is a mammal.”

My explanation was cut short by the chef bringing out an ALIEN faced fish.

Also called dolphin. Much smaller than Flipper. I gave the Germans the okay sing and left, wondering if the years of hippiedom had addled my mind.

There is only one answer