Construction and Implications of Cannabis Discourse in Thailand’s Cannabis Legalization: A Comparative Study of English-language Traditional and New Media

Abstract

Although news reports about cannabis legalization in Thailand were constructed on medical cannabis, several discourses were found in cannabis legalization in traditional and new media. Consequently, the purpose of this research is to examine how English-language texts were linguistically constructed to support or oppose Thailand’s cannabis legalization found in newspaper reports and posts on social media. This study is a qualitative research employing Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as the main theoretical framework in which texts were analyzed by using a linguistic analysis tool. The finding suggests that cannabis is constructed as an economic crop, a national property protected for only Thais, a patient benefit, traditional medicine, and a normal thing in pro-movement found in both Bangkok Post Newspaper and Highland Network Page which discourses are related to economic, social, cultural, political, and scientific dimensions. Furthermore, cannabis represented as traditional medicine is an outstanding discourse found in Thai context, which is rarely found in previous studies. However, Highland Network Page tends to provide the only positive side of cannabis and cannabis legalization. Although the negative implications of cannabis were mostly found in Bangkok Post, anti-movement contents were not explicitly reported. The construction of cannabis discourse also reveals the movement of social actors such as patients and activists campaigning against hegemony, farmers in the unfair economic system, healthcare system problems, and stigmatized cannabis users in Thailand.