Penalties and Enforcement Risk Under Thailand's Hazardous Substance Act

Chapter 4 of the Hazardous Substances Act B.E. 2535 (1992), Sections 70 through 89, sets out a detailed, graduated penalty structure that scales with both the type of violation and the classification tier of the hazardous substance involved. For a foreign company assessing real compliance risk in Thailand, the useful exercise is not memorizing every section number but understanding how the structure actually scales, since the gap between the lightest and heaviest penalties on the books is enormous, and which end of that range applies depends entirely on what kind of violation has occurred and which type of substance is involved.

Unlicensed Type 3 activity: up to two years and 200,000 Baht

A person who manufactures, imports, exports, or possesses a Type 3 hazardous substance without the required license, in violation of Section 23 paragraph one of the Act, faces imprisonment of up to two years, a fine of up to 200,000 Baht, or both. This is the penalty tier most relevant to a company that has not yet completed its Type 3 registration and licensing but proceeds with the regulated activity anyway, whether from a genuine misunderstanding of the requirement or an attempt to move product ahead of a compliance timeline.

Type 4 substances: up to ten years and one million Baht

At the top of the scale, a person who manufactures, imports, exports, or possesses a Type 4 hazardous substance, the tier prohibited outright under the Act, in violation of Section 43 paragraph one, faces imprisonment of up to ten years, a fine of up to 1,000,000 Baht, or both. Where the same offense is committed through negligence by an importer, exporter, or person in possession rather than intentionally, the penalty drops to a fine of up to 800,000 Baht without an accompanying prison term, but the fine ceiling remains close to the intentional-violation maximum, reflecting how seriously the Act treats any handling of a substance it has banned entirely, negligent or not.

Registration-revocation violations scale by both cause and substance type

A separate cluster of penalties, Sections 75 through 78, applies where a Type 3 substance's registration has been revoked and the person continues the regulated activity anyway, with the specific penalty depending on why the registration was revoked in the first place. Continuing an activity after revocation on safety grounds, where no ordinarily preventive measure exists, carries up to seven years imprisonment or a fine of up to 700,000 Baht, dropping to a maximum 500,000 Baht fine where the violation was negligent rather than intentional. Revocation because the registered substance no longer meets its registered quality standard carries up to five years or 500,000 Baht. A boastful, impolite, or misleading registered name carries up to one year or 100,000 Baht. And continuing to use a revoked registration itself, independent of why it was revoked, carries up to three years or 300,000 Baht. Critically, these same penalties apply at two-thirds strength where the violation involves a Type 2 substance instead of Type 3, and at one-half strength for a Type 1 substance, meaning the classification tier assigned to a product under DeeMED's Types 1-4 framework is not just a compliance-process question but a direct multiplier on penalty exposure if something later goes wrong.

Mislabeling and misleading claims carry their own penalty track

Separately from the registration and licensing penalties, a person who intentionally misleads others about a hazardous substance's origin, nature, quality, or quantity, including through a label containing false statements, faces up to one year imprisonment or a fine of up to 100,000 Baht, doubling to up to two years or 200,000 Baht if the same offense is repeated within six months of the first. Selling a hazardous substance without a label, or with an incorrect or officially revoked label, carries up to six months or 50,000 Baht for an ordinary seller, but rises to up to one year or 100,000 Baht where the offense is committed by the product's own producer or importer rather than a downstream seller, reflecting that the Act holds the party actually responsible for the label's content to a higher standard than a retailer simply moving already-labeled stock.

Company directors carry personal exposure

Where the offender under the Act is a juristic person, its directors, managers, or the specific individual with expertise responsible for the violation are personally liable to the same penalty prescribed for that offense if the violation arose from that person's order or act, or from that person's failure to act despite having a duty to do so that would have prevented it. This is a meaningful detail for a foreign company operating in Thailand through a local entity: incorporating the compliance relationship inside a Thai company does not, on its own, shield the individuals actually managing that company's hazardous substance activity from personal criminal and financial exposure if something goes wrong.

Repeat offenses compound the exposure further

Beyond the offense-specific enhancements already built into individual sections, a general rule applies across the Act: a person previously sentenced for an offense under the Act who commits the same offense again faces an additional penalty of half the term originally prescribed, on top of whatever penalty the repeated offense itself already carries. Combined with the Committee's separate power to bar a repeat offender from any hazardous substance business for up to five years following certain offenses, this makes a second violation materially more consequential than the first, not simply a repeat of the same exposure.

Advertising is regulated through consumer protection law, not a separate hazardous substance track

Control of hazardous substance advertising runs through Thailand's consumer protection law rather than through a bespoke advertising provision inside the Hazardous Substances Act itself. A hazardous substance whose label falls under the Act's own labeling notification is treated as goods whose advertising is controlled by the label control committee operating under that consumer protection framework, which means a marketing claim that would otherwise be a straightforward advertising standards question, is this claim substantiated, is this language misleading, sits on top of, rather than instead of, the mislabeling penalties already covered above. A company whose retail marketing overstates what its efficacy data actually supports is exposed on two fronts at once, not one.

A pending application is not the same as unlicensed operation

The Act does build in a real protection for a company that has filed but not yet received a decision on a Type 3 license: once a hazardous substance has been notified as Type 3 and an operator has applied for the required license within the specified period, that operator may continue the business temporarily until the competent official actually refuses to grant the license. The same provisional-continuation protection applies to a licensee who has filed a renewal application before the existing license expires. This matters because it means a complete, timely-filed application sitting in the review queue is not itself a Section 23 violation, even though the license has not yet been formally granted, provided the application was filed within whatever period the substance's Type 3 notification specified. A company that has filed correctly and on time is not exposed to the unlicensed-activity penalty simply because Thai FDA's own review has not yet concluded.

Seizure, destruction, and the settlement option

Any hazardous substance produced, imported, exported, or possessed in violation of the Act, along with its container and related equipment, is subject to submission to the responsible government agency for destruction or appropriate treatment, and where destruction occurs, the Court orders the substance's owner to pay all resulting expenses to the State. For lower-tier offenses, specifically those punishable by imprisonment of not more than one year or by a fine alone, the Committee has the power to settle the case, and an offender who pays the settled fine within thirty days of being informed of the amount has the matter deemed settled under the Criminal Procedure Code, avoiding a full prosecution for what the Act treats as its least serious violation category.

What this means for a risk assessment

The practical takeaway is that the classification tier a product carries, and whether a company's registration and licensing are actually current rather than merely on file somewhere, directly determines the scale of exposure if an inspection or dispute ever arises. A company confident its Type 3 household product is fully compliant should treat its registration renewal calendar with the same seriousness as its initial filing, since a lapsed registration converts an otherwise compliant operation into exactly the kind of unlicensed activity Section 23 penalizes, and the individuals managing that operation, not just the corporate entity, carry that exposure personally.

DeeMED builds ongoing compliance monitoring, not just initial registration, into our Hazardous Substances regulatory consulting work precisely because the Act's penalty structure treats a lapsed or informally-maintained registration as seriously as never having registered at all.