Joep Oomen

Joep Oomen built a legal argument out of a single plant. Belgian law tolerated an adult growing one cannabis plant for personal use. “If you’re allowed to grow one plant,” he reasoned, “you could also have that plant cared for by someone else.” On that idea he founded Trekt Uw Plant, “pull your plant”, in Antwerp in 2006: the first cannabis social club in Belgium.

He was born in the Netherlands and moved to Antwerp in the 1990s. In 1993 he was one of the founders of ENCOD, the European Coalition for Just and Effective Drug Policies, and as its coordinator ran its office in Antwerp, the driving force, in the words of Dutch colleagues, behind a coalition that reached into almost every country in Europe. He spoke Spanish, and was a link between the Belgian movement and Spain, where cannabis clubs were already common.

He told grow! in 2013 that he had smoked cannabis since he was thirteen, and that it had never been a problem for him in the Netherlands, with its coffeeshops. What changed his mind about drug policy was a journey through South America in the 1980s, where he saw the violence, the abuses and the poverty that the war on drugs brought to the producing countries.

One plant, many owners

The opening came from the law. In 2003 Belgium set cannabis apart from other drugs, and a directive of 2005 told prosecutors that an adult holding up to 3 grams or one plant, without nuisance, should get only a simplified police record. Trekt Uw Plant turned that individual tolerance into a collective arrangement: if one plant per adult was the lowest priority for prosecutors, members could have their single plants grown together, each tagged with a deed of ownership and a copy of the member’s identity card. The idea came, he said, from Spain, where clubs had worked on the same principle since 1995 and which he knew through ENCOD. It was a deliberate test of the law. The directive told prosecutors what to ignore; it said nothing about growing for others, and nothing in it authorised a club.

How the club works
Each member	Has one plant, grown for them in a shared grow room, with a name tag
Every two or three months	Members collect the harvest at an exchange market, the ruilbeurs
What members pay	A membership fee and the cost of growing, about €7 a gram
Members	About 400

In court

The authorities did not accept the reasoning at once. Oomen was arrested in December 2006, at the attempt to found the club. In May 2008 its board members each planted a single seed in a pot in public, and were convicted of inciting drug use; on 25 February 2010 the appeal court in Antwerp acquitted them, holding that the club did not set out to persuade others to use drugs. It was prosecuted twice, and twice acquitted, and it has worked undisturbed since. But the rulings settled only the charges in front of the court. Belgium never passed a law allowing collective cultivation, and the clubs stayed in a grey zone.

Oomen’s advice to the club’s growers was to meet a police raid with an open door, a smile and a pot of coffee, and an explanation of how the system worked. By 2013 there were about 250 members and nineteen growers. Others who copied it fared worse. A member, Michel Degens, started Mambo Social Club in Hasselt. It was raided, and its organisers, though acquitted of inciting drug use, were convicted of possession, production and sale, the court refusing to stretch personal possession to a shared grow room.

Year
1993	Co-founds ENCOD
2006	Founds Trekt Uw Plant; arrested in December
2010	The club’s organisers acquitted
2016	Dies in Antwerp, 18 March

Elsewhere

Through ENCOD he carried the model from country to country, in meetings, conferences and interviews: a non-profit club, growing only for its own adult members, open about what it did and ready to explain it to the police. Clubs on the Spanish and Belgian pattern were set up by activists in several European countries in the years that followed.

In the Netherlands he co-founded the VOC, the Union for the Abolition of Cannabis Prohibition, and organised a Cannabis Tribunal in The Hague. In Antwerp he also organised shelter for homeless people for years. He died unexpectedly at home on 18 March 2016, aged 54; the police ruled out a non-natural cause. In 2020 Trekt Uw Plant was still the largest of Belgium’s five registered clubs.^[1][2][3][4]