Cannabis in South-East Asian cooking

In mainland South-East Asia cannabis was a kitchen plant before it was a drug in anyone’s law. It was a seasoning and a household medicine. Twentieth-century prohibition, shaped by international drug control, changed the legal position of these older practices. Enforcement differed between countries and periods. The “happy” restaurants that tourists know are the visible end of an older and quieter custom.

A herb among herbs

Cannabis is thought to have come to South-East Asia from India around the sixteenth century. The Thai name, kancha, is the Indian ganja; the Khmer, Lao and Vietnamese names are the same word.

It had four uses: an ingredient and condiment in cooking, a medicine, a source of fibre, and a comfort for hard work. Labourers took it to relax their muscles. It was given to women to ease the pain of childbirth.

In Cambodia it stayed a common ingredient in food, and Cambodians think of it as something for older people; it is not popular with the young.

Austin Bush’s 2021 reporting identifies an eel curry calling for tender cannabis leaves in Mae Khrua Hua Pa, first printed in 1908 and generally considered Thailand’s oldest published cookbook. The recipe places cannabis among ordinary ingredients rather than presenting it as a novelty. Thai cooks used it in soups, curries and stir-fries for fragrance and savoury flavour; intoxication was not necessarily the purpose.

Marie Alexandrine Martin’s chapter in Cannabis and Culture (1975) supplies earlier field documentation, principally from Cambodia. She describes roasted cannabis leaves flavouring sngao moan, a chicken soup, and fresh leaves accompanying curries, vegetables and vermicelli soup. She also records leaves in fritters with prahok, fish paste, and stems used in Lao soups. Her explanation includes the flavour imparted to food, alongside reported psychoactive purposes. These are period observations, not a claim that the same practices occur throughout the region today.

Outlawed on paper

Country	Restrictions in the historical record	In practice
Thailand	The Cannabis Act of 1935 made possessing, growing, selling and using it crimes	Followed by the Narcotics Act of 1979
Cambodia	Martin reports an earlier cultivation prohibition; a general drug law followed in 1996	Martin nevertheless observed open market sales in her early-1970s field account
Laos	Illegal under the Law on Narcotics	Openly sold in some businesses despite the law
Vietnam	South Vietnam condemned it in 1968 and American advisers began spraying fields in 1969	The spraying was resented, and was called off in areas whose loyalty the government needed

The Vietnamese case shows how the plant looked from the village. When American officials began destroying cannabis in the Mekong Delta, they were warned off the lands of the Hòa Hảo sect for fear of driving its people to the other side in the war.

Happy pizza

In Phnom Penh, Siem Reap and Sihanoukville, restaurants with “Happy” in the name sell pizza and other dishes cooked with cannabis, or with it as a garnish. The same is found at Vang Vieng in Laos, where bars offer a “happy” menu.

They are commonest where the tourists are. They grew up in countries where cooking with cannabis was already ordinary and the ban was not enforced. The United Nations drugs office said in 2009 that cannabis cultivation had “ceased to be a major concern” in Cambodia. Since 2017 Cambodia has run harder anti-drug campaigns, and Laos applies the death penalty in some drug cases.

A photographed revival

The lead photograph records a modern revival of this cooking, not a historical meal. Bush photographed minced pork with holy basil and dried cannabis leaves at Ban Lao Reung in Prachinburi in 2021. The fresh leaf on top is visible, while the source identifies dried leaves among the cooked ingredients.

His visit also documented soups seasoned with leaf powder and cooks returning cannabis to noodle broth. These are regional dishes prepared in a working restaurant. Cambodia’s tourist-oriented happy pizzas belong to a different setting, even when both draw on the region’s longer familiarity with cannabis as food.

Thailand comes back to it

In 2019 Thailand became the first country in South-East Asia to legalise medical cannabis, and in 2022 it took the plant off its narcotics list altogether. Thousands of shops opened.

The opening was partly reversed in 2025, when new rules classed the flower as a controlled herb, to be sold only on prescription, including the prescription of a practitioner of traditional Thai medicine. The old use is thus the one the law now recognises, and the new recreational trade the one it is trying to close.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6]}