As a first-year student in Vancouver, Gaurav Sehgal was awoken by a loud sound in the middle of the night. One of his fellow dorm residents had set off the fire alarm microwaving popcorn. The last thing he remembered was walking toward a keypad, punching in the code to get back into his room. When he regained consciousness, he was in an ambulance with a paramedic telling him he'd just had a seizure, blood on his clothes from where his face had hit the ground. He had no memory of any of it. Only what other people told him afterward.

"You lose control of the one thing you're supposed to have complete control of — your own body, your own mind — and you have no record of the loss."

It took him a few more years to finally sit with the label: epileptic. He got on medication. His doctor told him there were no side effects. There were many. Insomnia, irritability, and a mental fog that hung over his day-to-day. He was taking four pills every night before sleep, then something else to counter the insomnia they caused, then waking up an hour and a half later anyway. From his own account, he was someone who wouldn't reach for a painkiller unless his head was about to physically explode. Taking this medication every single night, for eight years, was not something he made peace with so much as endured.

The break for his treatment came at a trade show in Hong Kong, where he was attending as an organic F&B manufacturer. Here, Gaurav came across a Charlotte's Web booth. He told them his story, and they sent him home with samples to try. He brought the CBD oil back to Bangkok and took it every night. For three months, nothing dramatic happened. But by the fourth month, the insomnia was gone. The irritability had lifted. He was still on his epilepsy medication, but something had rebalanced.

The science behind it fascinated him as much as the relief. 

"I learned about the endocannabinoid system," he says, "and how CBD fits like a Lego puzzle in your body’s cells." 

Finally, there was a plant-derived compound able to do what he relied on Valium and Xanax for, minus the physical cost. 

He started ordering the oil online. It worked fine for a while, until a shipment got flagged at customs and he had to go in and explain himself, which went about as well as you'd expect. They put his CBD oil in a basket and asked him to leave.

 "I just felt really let down," he says. "Here was something good, helping me, getting me off bad medicine, and the FDA is not allowing me to have it." 

He went home and started learning how to grow cannabis. He started sourcing his own CBD seeds and pressing his own CBD oil in his kitchen. For a while, it was the best version of the thing he'd ever had.

THE START OF SIAM GREEN

By the time Thailand's cannabis industry began to open up, Gaurav already had investors and a business plan in place. He'd worked at Triangle Group, then Eastern Spectrum, building his sense of what good operations looked like. When June 9, 2022 arrived and the country effectively decriminalised cannabis, the decision was immediate. 

"I understood I had a mission," he says. 

The business was incorporated around October of that year. The first branch of Siam Green opened in Phrom Phong in January 2023, sharing a building with a Nashville chicken joint called Birdies on the second floor. From the ground floor where the store is, the BTS station is visible through the floor to ceiling windows. With the cars, bikes, and foot traffic of Sukhumvit, it is passed by thousands of people everyday — the beating heart of the city.

The shop had to look a certain way. As an Indian man opening a cannabis shop in Bangkok, Gaurav was acutely aware of what the space needed to communicate. It needed to be clean, warm, and polished for both customers and family. 

"I needed to have a place that my mum and dad could come to," he says simply. 

After seeing the shop, his parents were quite pleased. And it’s easy to see why. The store maintains a minimal and understated design throughout that makes the space calming and gives off a premium feel you want from a high-end dispensary. The store breaks up the white walls with accented ones colored in the brand’s signature texture: the neon green and navy blue waves.

QUALITY CONTROL

At the time, much of what was opening across Thailand was the opposite: roadside stalls, grungy setups, the cannabis equivalent of a back-alley transaction. Gaurav remembers an interaction he had with someone at a beachside cannabis stall in Phuket. Even from a distance, he could see that one of the flower jars had mold in it — practically fused to the inside of the jar. When Gaurav pointed it out to the budtender, he said sorry, and took the jar out of the cart. Right after this, thinking Gaurav was a foreigner, the man asked his helper in Thai to turn the moldy flower in the jar into pre-rolls for customers.

"I didn't know what to do," he says. "Whether to punch the guy in the face or call the police." 

He walked away and thought about it for a long time. That experience is part of why every Siam Green branch has a custom-engineered refrigerator, built to precise temperature and humidity specifications, monitored remotely by Gaurav, the store manager, and their dedicated flower manager simultaneously. The moment something goes wrong, all three get a notification on their phones. When they once found mold at one of the stores, they shut down for two hours, cleaned every surface with alcohol, and contacted every customer who had purchased from that batch.

"We take our responsibility very, very serious," he says. 

He doesn't say it as though it's exceptional. It's just how it's supposed to work. All of Siam Green's flower is GACP compliant, sourced exclusively from Thai farms, and held to a standard so high that they've upset a few growers along the way. 

HEALTH ORIENTED

Walking through the store, the thinking behind it is clear in the details. There's a health wall carrying Nativ mushroom supplements and wellness products alongside the cannabis. Gaurav knows that most people who walk in are looking for some version of the same thing — relief, balance, sleep, a way to manage something that isn't being managed well enough by other means. CBD is on offer, as are SEYA products and colorful herbal smoking blends with lavender and mugwort. Meanwhile, the brand’s apparel includes tank tops, hats, bongs and totes. The budtenders are trained to ask one question first: what's your experience level? Everything follows from there.

"The first question is always: what's your experience?" Gaurav explains. "Are you here because you have an illness, or do you want to deal with something specifically? If they're not, then maybe they don't even get recommended flower."

The most common ailments he hears are sleep, stress, and anxiety. Occasionally chronic pain, and sometimes something heavier — cancer or epilepsy — where the person usually already knows what they need and just wants access to flower they can trust.

Siam Green. He's lost business over it, and earned one-star reviews from customers who call the store a scam for following a law that most of his competitors simply ignore. He's not bothered. A prescription costs 100 baht on its own, or comes free with any purchase over 500 baht, and is valid for up to 30 days depending on what the doctor determines. 

"I've earned a lot of one-star reviews just for following the rules," he says. "People say don't go here, they require a prescription, and I don't need one anywhere else. But the other places, they're just not following it."

Siam Green now has five branches — Phrom Phong, Nana, Koh Samui, and a location in Chinatown that shares a wall with Jay Fai. Gaurav has also helped build a cannabis industry network at www.tcnetwork.me, working to bring coherence to the Thai cannabis landscape. His read on where the industry sits right now is pointed: "Too much," he says. Too many stores, too many people who got in because the barrier to entry was made absurdly low. Afterall, a cannabis license requiring little more than 3,000 baht and a rental agreement is a threshold set way too low. Gaurav thinks it should be at least as hard to get as an alcohol license. What’s worse is many of those people selling illegal products alongside the weed. 

"Everyone wants to be a cowboy," he says. "It's the wild wild west."

At the same time, he thinks the government's pivot toward full medicalization is the wrong answer. Stretchers, blood pressure machines, full clinical infrastructure in a cannabis retail context — "nobody coming into a cannabis store is going to require a stretcher," he says. What he is really after is the middle ground nobody is building toward: real education requirements, accountability, and strict quality standards. All of these are possible without the need to going through a clinic.

"I believe in the goal of what the whole thing is trying to do," he says of the regulatory push. "I just don't believe in this method."

These days, Gaurav doesn't really smoke. Takes CBD occasionally. Somewhere in the first two years of running the business, his own relationship with cannabis quietly changed. His body just said it had found its balance and he seems perfectly at ease with it. The man who once pressed his own oil in his kitchen, who had his medication seized at customs and turned that frustration into something, who built five stores on the conviction that this plant deserved better. He's still convinced. He's just quieter about it in his own life.

Siam Green Dispensary — Phrom Phong, Nana, Koh Samui, Chinatown

https://siamgreenco.com

Phrom Phong Branch

663 Sukhumvit Rd, Khwaeng Khlong Tan Nuea, Watthana, Bangkok 10110, Thailand

11 PM - 3 AM