Cannabis social clubs

A cannabis social club is a private, non-profit association whose members grow cannabis together and share it among themselves. Nothing is sold to outsiders. The idea was worked out by users in Spain in the 1990s, in a gap left by Spanish law, and it has since been written into the laws of Uruguay, Malta and Germany as a way of allowing cannabis without allowing a market.

How a club works

Feature
Legal form	A registered non-profit association
Members	Adults, admitted by name; no walk-in customers
Growing	Done collectively, in quantities meant to cover the members’ own use
Payment	A subscription that covers the cost of production. No profit is distributed
Limits	Each member may take up to a fixed amount a month, and may not resell
Publicity	None
Government	A general assembly at least once a year, with accounts open to the members

The European network ENCOD, which coined the name “Cannabis Social Club” in 2005, sums the model up as “transparency, democracy and non-profitability”. The contrast intended is with the Dutch coffeeshop, which is a business open to any adult.

The Spanish gap

Spanish law punishes trafficking. It does not treat use as a crime, nor growing for one’s own use, nor sharing among a closed group of users. The clubs were built in that space: if the members own the crop in common and each takes only a share for which they have paid the cost, then, the argument runs, nothing has been sold.

The courts have never settled whether the argument holds.

Year	What happened
Early 1990s	ARSEC, the first association, is founded in Barcelona
1993	The movement gets its magazine, Cáñamo
1997	Four of its members are sentenced to four months in prison and a fine. About the same time a court in Bilbao finds another club within the law
2000s	Hundreds of clubs open, most in Catalonia and the Basque Country
2006–2007	Club members in Andalusia are acquitted and their crops returned
2012	The Catalan village of Rasquera votes on leasing land to a Barcelona club with 5,000 members, to pay its debts. The plan misses the required majority, and a court revokes the agreements in 2013
2015	The Supreme Court convicts the organisers of three large clubs, holding that what they did was not genuine shared consumption
2017	Catalonia passes a law regulating clubs. The Constitutional Court annuls it the next year
2023	Barcelona’s mayor promises to close the city’s clubs
2026	A draft tobacco law would remove the exemption for private smokers’ clubs that cannabis clubs rely on

By 2019 there were more than two hundred clubs in the Barcelona area alone. In 2022 it was reported that some had been used by drug trafficking networks.

Written into law elsewhere

What Spain tolerated, other countries regulated.

Country	Since	Rules
Uruguay	2014	15 to 45 members; up to 99 plants; one of three legal routes, beside home growing and pharmacy sales
Malta	2021	Associations may grow for their members: up to 7 grams a day and 50 grams a month each. The first ones opened in 2024, and stricter rules followed in 2025
Switzerland	2021	Not regulated as such, but pilot trials including club models are allowed until 2031
Germany	2024	Cultivation associations of up to 500 members; up to 25 grams a day and 50 grams a month each

In Belgium, where an adult may grow one plant, Joep Oomen founded the first club, Trekt Uw Plant, in Antwerp in 2006. It was prosecuted and acquitted, but no law followed.

In South Africa, clubs calling themselves Dagga Private Clubs have appeared since the Constitutional Court’s ruling of 2018, in a legal grey area like Spain’s.

In Italy, the name also became a vehicle for patient campaigning. On 15 January 2013, Lucia Spiri and Andrea Trisciuoglio founded LaPianTiamo in Racale, Puglia. Parrella’s 2014 account describes their aim as collective cultivation for patients facing delays and costs in obtaining imported cannabis medicines. Their association sought a lawful supply route; its founding did not itself authorise a shared crop. This was a therapeutic campaign, with a different emphasis from the adult-use associations in Spain.

An older ancestor

The name is new but the thing has a precedent. In the United States of the 1920s, when alcohol was prohibited and cannabis was not, “teapads” opened in the cities: comfortably furnished rooms where jazz was played and cannabis smoked. They disappeared when cannabis was banned in its turn.

Does it work?

Research suggests that clubs can be good for public health and harm reduction, since a club knows its members and what it gives them. It does not always happen. A study of 2021 found “significant gaps” in the information clubs gave on risks, in health support for members and in laboratory testing of the cannabis, and put much of it down to the legal grey area in which most clubs still work.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]}