Thailand Kratom Maps - List of Chang Mai Rai Pai Kratom Dispensaries Stores Cafes and Vendors on Kratom Maps of Thailand. Where buy Kratom
Cannabis and Kratom online information in Thailand:
Facebook trends 2015–2016
Kanittha Thaikla1
, Kanokporn Pinyopornpanish2* , Wichuda Jiraporncharoen2 and Chaisiri Angkurawaranon2
Abstract
Background: Our study aims to evaluate the trends in online information about cannabis and kratom on Facebook
in Thailand, where there is current discussion regarding legalizing these drugs.
Methods: Between April and November 2015, reviewers searched for cannabis and kratom Facebook pages in the
Thai language via the common search engines. Content analysis was performed and the contents of each page
were categorized by the tone of the post (positive, negative or neutral). Then, a one-year follow-up search was
conducted to compare the contents.
Results: Twelve Facebook pages each were initially identified for cannabis and for kratom. Follower numbers
were higher for cannabis pages. Kratom pages were less active but were open for a longer time. Posts with
positive tones and neutral tones were found for both drugs, but none had negative tones. Other drugs were
mentioned on the cannabis pages, but they were different from those mentioned on the kratom pages.
Issues regarding drug legalization were found on the cannabis pages but not on the kratom pages during
the searching period. One year later, the tone of the posts was in the same direction, but the page activity
had increased.
Conclusions: The information currently available on the sampled Facebook pages was positive towards the
use of cannabis and kratom. No information about harm from these drugs was found through our search.
Keywords: Thailand, Internet, Facebook, Psychoactive drug, Kratom, Cannabis, Marijuana
Background
Cannabis (marijuana) and kratom (Mitragyna speciosa)
have been reported to have increasing worldwide use [7].
Studies have shown many negative impacts on health
with excessive use of these substances. [18]. Cannabis
use is related to many psychological conditions, cardiovascular events, respiratory tract problems and cognitive
impairment [10, 28], while kratom could be associated
with stimulant effects and opioid-like side effects. Longterm and high-dose usage of kratom has been associated
with weight loss, hyperpigmentation, tremor, insomnia,
fatigue, poor concentration and possibly seizures [12, 21,
24]. Due to the potential harm, together with the possibility of misuse by users, the Thai Narcotics Control
Division has categorized these plants as illicit drug
category V, which is illegal to produce, dispose, import,
export or possess [17].
These two drugs have been reported to have various
medicinal benefits. Cannabis has been used to decrease
nausea, vomiting, and spasticity as well as in pain control and appetite improvement [8]. Kratom was also
reported to have positive effects, especially antiinflammatory, cough-reducing, anti-diarrheal and pain
relief effect [12]. Many organizations or groups of people
who advocate for legalization use the potential medical
benefits of these drugs to drive law changes. However,
one study found that cannabis that is legally used for
medical purposes is also more likely to be recreationally
used by the general population [19]. Thailand is still in
discussion regarding legalizing these drugs. As they are
still illegal drugs, people are influenced to obtain them
from routes outside of government regulation. The online market is one of those routes. * Correspondence: knp_02@hotmail.com 2
Department of Family Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Chiang Mai University,
Chiang Mai 50200, Thailand
Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
© The Author(s). 2018 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to
the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver
(http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
Thaikla et al. Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy (2018) 13:15
https://doi.org/10.1186/s13011-018-0155-4
Over the past decade, the internet has become a major
location where people communicate and search for information, including that regarding drugs. In Thailand
and other countries, illicit drugs and illegal prescriptions
drugs are available online with a wide variety of information [4, 11, 15, 20, 22, 23, 27]. The commonly controlled
psychoactive substances that have been investigated for
online information in prior studies were opiates and
cannabis. In contrast, kratom, to the best of our knowledge, has not been studied for online content. This
plant is typically used only in a small part of the world,
and Thailand is one of the most popular market places
[13]. Kratom is currently also available in the European
online drug market and is a current topic for legal status
debate in the United State. [9, 22, 25]
In recent years, the Thai government has been considering changing the drug schedule for cannabis and kratom. This study aims to evaluate the trend of online
information on Facebook pages devoted to cannabis and
kratom (the most popular and easily accessible social
network site among Thai users) [5] by categorizing their
content based on positive, negative, and neutral tones,
determining page activities and noting what other drugs
are mentioned in conjunction with cannabis or kratom.
These findings of this content analysis may help provide
indicators of whether cannabis- and kratom-related content posted on Facebook is potentially harmful to social
network users. The findings may also help contextualize
the current legal uncertainty of cannabis and kratom in
Thailand.
Methods
Surveys of content were conducted twice, 1 year apart.
The first round of the survey was conducted between
April and November 2015. Reviewers manually searched
websites daily by entering keywords for cannabis and kratom in the Thai language via the common search engines:
Google, Yahoo, and Ask Bing. New keywords obtained
during the search process were then used for extended
searches. All the keywords are described in Table 1. We
additionally conducted a specific search by using “site:
Facebook.com” (e.g., กระท่อม site: Facebook.com) to access
more pages directly from Facebook via their search engine.
We observed the first 300 websites listed from each search,
and only Facebook pages were collected for further analysis.
We recorded the names of Facebook pages and
page URL addresses in order to track the pages. The
number of followers was also recorded as a proxy for
the popularity of the page. Content analysis of posts
was done by a team of reviewers (KP, WJ, CA). Two
independent authors (KP and WJ) individually categorized the first 50 posts. Independently, the two reviewers agreed on 88% of the post. The interrater
agreement (kappa) for the first 50 posts was 0.72 (appendix 1). They then collaborated to reach conclusions for the first 50 posts, and then discussed with
CA if there was any discrepancy. Afterward, the posts
were categorized independently by KP and later
reviewed by one of the other two reviewers. The
tones of the content were analysed related to the
drug and divided into three categories which were
positive tone, negative tone and neutral tone. This
categorization was adapted from a prior study on
marijuana-related traffic on Twitter [27]. A positive
tone denoted the text and/or pictures that implied a
notably positive attitude towards the use of the drugs.
Pictures of smoking people, tools to be used with the
drugs, ready-to-use drugs in containers and advertising or marketing of drug-related products were also
included. Any content against the use of the drugs
was categorized as a negative tone. Neutral tone included the contents that were unlikely to convince
people to think positively or negatively about the use
of the drugs, for example, a general greeting by an
administrator, a picture of the plant or leaves without
words, news about laws or research findings without
an opinion, and any unrelated topic. Posts about
changes in profile picture or cover picture were categorized as neutral. The rate of posting was evaluated
by the duration between the last post and the tenth
post from the last. A longer period showed less activity on the page. The tones of the posts were obtained
and analysed from these last ten posts from each
page. The names of other drugs that were suggested
Table 1 Keywords
Drugs Keywords (Thai Language)
Cannabis
(กัญชา)
กัญชา, กัญชาไทย ขายกัญชาออนไลน์, เขียว กัญชา, บ้องกัญชา, กัญชา ยาเสพติด, ไทยสติ๊ก, กัญชา ไทยสติ๊ก
กัญชา หญ้ายิ้ม, ดูดกัญชา, สูบกัญชา, เป็ดน้อย กัญชา, ยาเส้น กัญชา, เสพกัญชา
สายเขียว, ขายกัญชา, กัญชาอัดแท่งขายเมล็ดกัญชา. กระตุกบ้องกัญชา, บุหรี่ยัดไส้กัญชา,
คนกัญชา, กัญชาสายเขียว, กัญชาเดินดง, กัญชา ขาย แจก, กัญชา ขาย ดูด, ยาหม้อ กัญชา, กัญชา ด้ายแดง, กัญชา ใบไม้เมา,
ปุ๊นกัญชา สายเขียว, สายเขียว กัญชา, กัญชาผสมน้ำผึ้ง, ขายเนื้อ กัญชา, กัญชาขายยังไง
Kratom
(กระท่อม)
กระท่อม, น้ำท่อม, 4*100 ภาคใต้, 4*100 น้ำท่อม, ชนมือ ใบกระท่อม, ใบไม้ยัน,กระท่อม ยัน, ใบไม้เชือน, เอแดง ใบกระท่อม,
ใบไม้ขม, กินท่อม ขายน้ำต้มใบกระท่อม,สายเชือน,ท่อมชาเขียว,ชากระท่อม, กระท่อม น้ำต้มใบกระท่อม, ขายใบมัด
ใบโล,ใบกระท่อมก้านแดง, เมาน้ำท่อม, ขายใบกระท่อม, กินน้ำท่อม
Thai-language keywords used for searching via the common search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Ask Bing)
Thaikla et al. Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy (2018) 13:15 Page 2 of 8
to be used with cannabis or kratom in pages were
collected to estimate the drugs recommended by the
page administrators..
The one-year follow-up search was conducted in
October 2016 for 1 week using the URL pages that had
been used in 2015. Additionally, new searches were conducted using the 2015 keywords. This follow-up was
done in order to estimate the activity and availability of
the 2015 pages and to evaluate the content posted on
the 2016 pages using the same analysis theme.
Results
Initially, twenty-four total pages were identified, twelve
for kratom and twelve for cannabis. These pages had
varying numbers of followers. The overall number of followers for cannabis was higher. Posts with positive tones
and neutral tones were found for both drugs, but none
had negative tones. The results were similar in both periods of searching, 1 year apart. Although there were
many posts with a neutral tone about the King who
passed away and the country’s great loss during the
follow-up period, it seemed that the posts in October
2016 were more likely to have a positive tone about the
drugs. Examples of the posts and the categorizations of
positive tone are demonstrated in Table 2.
Both drugs had deactivated pages, but new pages were
found after 1 year. There was some weak evidence that
the number of deactivated pages was higher for cannabis
than kratom (p = 0.10). However, ten new Facebook
pages for cannabis were found after 1 year, while only
three new pages were found for kratom. During the entire study period, we evaluated a total of 24 cannabis
pages (267 posts) and 15 kratom pages (206 posts).
Online information for Cannabis on Facebook
The numbers of followers ranged from 225 to 208,695
for the twelve cannabis pages initially found. The average duration between the last ten posts was 46 days (SD
45.8, median 27 days, range 7–148 days). The tone of
the posts was likely to be positive towards the use of
cannabis (Table 2). Some posts were neutral, but a negative tone was not found. The total number of posts
counted for some pages did not reach ten during the
searching period. There was one other drug mentioned
on the cannabis pages. The administrators mostly discussed cannabis, but one page also mentioned Procodyl®
(promethazine hydrochloride). The tones of the posts,
numbers of followers, and names of other drugs mentioned on pages for cannabis are shown in Table 3.
One year later, most cannabis pages were not available
(9/12 pages), and twelve new pages were found with similar trends in the tone of the posts. The news about the
medical benefit and legalization were shared. In 2016, two
pages used similar names to those of two pages found in
2015 that were not available when searching by URL. The
remaining pages had an increasing number of followers,
and the other drug groups mentioned on the cannabis
pages were different from those in 2015. We found three
cannabis pages that mentioned kratom (not including the
kratom pages) and one page about Ya-ba - a tablet containing methamphetamine and caffeine [29]. The duration
between the last ten posts was shorter among the cannabis pages, with an average of 29 days (SD 52.4, median 8
days, range 1–160).
Online information for Kratom on Facebook
Followers for the twelve pages ranged from 89 to 7336.
The average duration of the last ten posts was 85 days
(SD 64.5, median 111 days, range 0–163 days). The tone
of the posts was similar to those on the cannabis pages,
in that there was more content in positive tones about
kratom use. Content about legal issues, which was found
on the cannabis pages, was not found on the kratom
pages (Table 2). More than half of the kratom pages
mentioned other drugs, as shown in Table 4. Two pages
mentioned cannabis but were not found when searching
for cannabis. Most pages mentioned controlled prescription drugs with sedative effects. The most common one
was cough syrup containing antihistamines (chlorpheniramine or diphenhydramine) and ammonium chloride,
which was categorized by the Thai Food and Drug
Administration as a dangerous drug. These included AChlordyl®, Cephendryl®, Bephendryl®, A-waryl®, Iwadil®,
Inadril®, and I-22 syrup®.
Five out of twelve of kratom Facebook pages were not
available after 1 year, and three new pages were found.
The other drugs mentioned in the kratom pages and the
tone of the posts were similar to those in 2015. The median duration between the last ten posts was shorter
than that in 2015, but the mean was approximately
100 days (SD 114.7, median 54.5 days, range 0–308).
Discussion
The possession or use of cannabis or kratom is illegal in
Thailand. This metanarrative contextualizes the content
analysis that was conducted for this study. The majority
of public information on Facebook regarding these drugs
is positive for the use of the drugs. The contents posted
on Facebook pages for both drugs tended towards convincing people to use and buy the drugs online by using
invitation text and photos, and this tendency continued
at a one-year follow-up. No warning regarding the harm
of these drugs was observed. Cannabis pages tended to
be more popular and more active than kratom pages.
Cannabis pages were available on Facebook with a
high number of followers. At the one-year follow-up,
their contents were in the same tones, and the number
of followers remained high even though some pages had
Thaikla et al. Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy (2018) 13:15 Page 3 of 8
Table 2 Illustration of Posts Categorized by tones and topic of interest
Topic Cannabis Kratom
Posts with Positive tone
Persuasive Greeting with/ without
Picture
“Good morning! Have you smoked weed today?” “Admin wants to eat kratom. What about you guys?”
“May 31 is World No Tobacco Day. Cannabis smoking
is better.”
“Hey my friend, it’s morning! Do you want one pot of
this? Ha ha!” (with kratom tea picture)
“I woke up at 3 AM so I used once (This one is portable
with the size of your palm).
“I was away for long. I’m back with Kratom today!!”
(with picture of Kratom leaves and the bottle of cough
suppressant)
“What a wonderful wedding ceremony. They serve
Kratom tea. Awsome!”
Mention of Properties/ Benefits “Blue Dream is one of the best-seller cannabis in the US.
With its anti-depressive and analgesic effect and the
berry-like taste, no doubt that it becomes more and
more popular.”
“If you are not kratom users, you would not know the
benefits of it. I tried to find the pros and cons of this
drug and found mostly pros. For example, knowing
more people, sharing experience, having responsibility,
knowing how to manage finances or supply, never
causing trouble to other people (better than alcohol).
There are some cons, for example, learning impairment
(but in my experience my friends have good grades and
I want everyone to be like this)…”
“… The medical properties are anti-diarrheal and some
would say it could treat diabetes.”
Opinion “Cannabis cures everything.” “It’s friendship. Even we are in different age or different
socioeconomic status, when we sit together, we all
allies. When we get drunk, we never fight any one. The
thing that happens is only friendship.”
“Cannabis kills no one.”
“Good for your mind. Everyone likes it.”
“Once you smoke, even you are feeling so sad, you will
always have a smile.”
“Cannabis has never lied so I love it all my heart”
Planting Teaching and giving tips on how to plant and
encouraging people to grow cannabis
Picture of kratom tree with phrase
“not so long to be professional (on planting)”
“can be eaten soon”
Law Issue “Let’s sign your name on this site xxx.com to support the
removal of cannabis from the drug schedule. Tell your
friends too!”
None
“Cannabis has lots of benefits (kill cancer, anxiolytic
effect) and is less addictive compared to alcohol and
cigarettes. Why is it illegal whereas alcohol is harmful to
health but legally sold? I don’t understand Thai law.”
Marketing - Plants, seeds, leaves and equipment were marketed. - Mostly sell kratom leaves.
“Add me (Line ID xxx) if you want to know where to get
cannabis seed.”
“If you need a large amount of kratom, please contact
us. We sell them in limited quantities.”
“We invite you to our page HighBong. We sell glass
vaporizer and all kind of equipment for cannabis users.
We also have a new page for gaining more customers.
“A large number of kratom leaves sold here. 1 kg 900
baht. 2 kg 850 baht. 3 and above 800/kg. Limited
supply, please order now.”
There may be only a few items but we plan to have
more soon and ensure to you that we will send them
right to your hand. We can guarantee delivery!”
“Only two months to grow. If you are interested, please
leave your Line ID, we will contact you.”
- Link to webpage about the cannabis was embedded
in some page.
- Pictures of products and packages and reviews from
customers about the products they bought
Pictures with or without text but
Showing Usage
Picture of cannabis leaves and plants together with
vapor or “bong” in different designs, and/or people
(adult or child) who were smoking weed
Picture of kratom tea in the pot or glass which was
ready to drink and/or with people drinking that tea
near the pot
“In this hot weather, we need some sweet.” (with picture
of kratom tea and a bottle of cough suppressant)
Thaikla et al. Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy (2018) 13:15 Page 4 of 8
been deactivated. The content was similar to that
found in prior studies conducted in the US [2, 3, 27].
People expressed their good feeling about cannabis,
telling other people that they wanted to use it, inviting
others to try, mentioning the benefits of the drugs on
relieving stress and its medical purposes, suggesting
that it should be legalized, and comparing it to other
legal drugs by noting its greater benefits and lower
risks to health. Posts against cannabis use were comparatively infrequent in the previous study [3] while
we found none in our study.
Kratom was similar to cannabis that the tones of the
posts on Facebook were positive and neutral rather than
negative in tone. The post contents were mainly about
inviting people to try using it and to observe its benefits.
However, kratom was less popular by posting rate and
number of followers than cannabis was. This effect could
result from the fact that kratom is mainly used in the
southern part of Thailand, unlike cannabis, which is
more common nationwide. Moreover, cannabis social
trends in Thailand could be driven by the legalization of
recreational cannabis in the US in the recent years.
Thus, we observed posts about legalization on the cannabis pages unlike the kratom pages.
Both drugs had deactivated pages, but new pages were
found after 1 year. There were a higher number of deactivated pages and new pages for cannabis compared to
the number of pages found initially. One limitation of
our study was being unable to know the reasons for page
deactivation, i.e., whether it was government action or
by intention of the administrators to hide from
government investigation. This finding could imply that
cannabis sellers could be more alert and aware of the action of legal authorities, due to the more serious penalties for cannabis than for kratom under Thai law. They
may deactivate and open new pages to avoid this action,
and sometimes a similar name might be used for the old
page followers to recognize and trace the new page [6].
In contrast, kratom is less popular and carries less serious punishments for possession or distribution than
cannabis. This reason may be why fewer new pages and
fewer deactivated pages were observed when compared
with cannabis pages.
We also observed that online content such as advertising or marketing could raise awareness among
regulators. This finding indicates that Facebook may
also act as a distributor of the drugs. However, it
could be useful that contact details or addresses could
help direct investigators of the administrators of these
pages to a possible virtual market place for further
evaluation. Furthermore, advertising content must be
a greater concern. Subjective opinions and recommendations given by users about these drugs without
any scientific evidence to support them should be
highlighted. In this study, we did not differentiate
Facebook pages into user-generated or sellergenerated pages, as this difference was not part of
our initial aims in the study. However, similar content
could be posted by both types of pages and be dangerous to customers if they believe it uncritically.
Thus, media literacy education may be helpful, as also
suggested in a prior study, which found that most
Table 2 Illustration of Posts Categorized by tones and topic of interest (Continued)
Topic Cannabis Kratom
Posts with Neutral tone
Changing page cover or page profile
(which we automatically categorized
as neutral tone)
Picture of the plant or leaves Picture of the plant or leaves
Posting about weapons (Guns)
Picture of smiling person
Sharing news about law or research
finding without opinion
-News about seminar of the committee from the law
reform commission of Thailand about the drug policy
None
-News about HEMPLAND – the exhibition talking
about present and future of cannabis industry of Thai
-News about decriminalization of drug use and
possession for personal consumption from UNODC
-News about the future policy about cannabis tax
payment to support education
General greeting by administrator of
any unrelated topic to the drug
-Picture or text related to king RAMA9 death -Picture or text related to king RAMA9 death
-Sharing video about Thai dancing -Picture of brown color drink in soft drink bottle
-Picture of a lighter with phase “one of the most
common lost items”
-Updating page status by administrator “Please add
our new page. This page will be close out soon.”
-Updating page status by administrator “I’m back.
From tomorrow, I will update the page daily. Will get
you some VDO! Have a good night everybody!!!”
This table describes posts with positive and neutral tone categorized by topic. The contents in cannabis page were slightly different from kratom page
Thaikla et al. Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy (2018) 13:15 Page 5 of 8
media messages from retailers emphasize unproven
health benefits without describing harm [1].
The trend of recommending other drugs to be used with
cannabis was different from that of kratom. Cannabis
pages rarely mentioned other drugs, which could indicate
that it is primarily used alone. In contrast, kratom tended
to be used with additional compounds to enhance the psychoactive effect by adding drugs and/or medication with a
hypnotic effect. In Thailand, these drugs are categorized
as dangerous drugs, controlled drugs, or illicit drugs that
could be harmful to the user [16, 26]. Accordingly, the online information that encourages people to use a combination of these drugs could lead to more troublesome
health outcomes.
At the one-year follow-up, increased page activity
was observed for both drugs, and the posts were
positive towards the use of the drugs. No postings educated people regarding the pros and cons of the
drugs without suggesting opinions. Increasing the
number of pages containing knowledge about the
drugs or support systems for substance-using individuals, such as online therapy, maybe useful in order to
facilitate accessibility for at-risk populations [14].
The strength of our study was that our searching
was conducted on search engines that provided additional keywords that the general public could reach
by a simple search. In addition, the one-year followup with the recorded URLs for old pages helped determine the activity of the pages and compared the
trends of posts and tones changes within each page.
New searches with the same keywords in the next
year helped compare the page activities and the
Table 3 Cannabis Facebook Pages in 2015 and 2016
Page 2015 2016
Followers
in 2015
Tones
(Number)
10 Posts
Duration (days)
Other Drug(s)
Mentioned on Page
Followers
in 2016
Tones
(Number)
10 posts
Duration (days)
Other Drug(s)
Mentioned on Page
P N U Number Name(s) P N U Number Name(s) Number of pages, number of followers, number of posts categorized by tones, page activity and other drug mentioned in page were defined for cannabis pages
both found in 2015 (12 pages) and 2016 (15 pages), P positive, N negative, U neutral a
Same name but different URL
b
Similar shop name “Bong party” at the end of the page title c
= less than ten posts
Thaikla et al. Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy (2018) 13:15 Page 6 of 8
changes in post trends. Although new slang words
might be missed that originated in the succeeding
year, we hypothesized that only a few new slang
words would be created within 1 year. Therefore, we
believed that our initial keywords could cover most of
the slang used among Thai people regarding these
drugs.
The limitations of our study were that only Thailanguage Facebook pages were searched, which would
underestimate the number of postings with a hashtag
that could be searchable through Facebook or pages with
other languages which could also be accessed. Our study
did not examine online information from other sites
which may contain other educational information which
could reflect other sources of the information that
reaches the general population regarding these drugs.
Conclusion
The current situation on Facebook regarding cannabis and kratom shows a somewhat positive attitude
towards the use of these drugs. In addition, the content of some pages was trying to support legalization.
No information about harm from these drugs was found
through our search.
Funding
This work was funded by the Thailand Substance Abuse Academic Network
(58-B-002). The funder had no role in the study design, analysis,
interpretation or decision to publish.
Availability of data and materials
Please contact author for data requests.
Authors’ contributions
KT, KP, and CA were involved in the conception of the manuscript and the
design. KT collected the data. KT, KP, WJ and CA performed data analysis. KT
and KP drafted the manuscript. All authors revised, read and then approved
the final manuscript.
Ethics approval and consent to participate
This was an observational study of publicly available data and did not
involve human participants. Accordingly, approval from an institutional
review board was not required.
Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in
published maps and institutional affiliations.