No room for stoners: Freital cannabis club cannot find property
Cannabis – landlords apparently still associate it with shady characters and crime. The distancing rules also make things difficult for the “Green Harmony’s Cannabis Club”.
A cannabis social club must be 200 meters away from schools, children’s and youth facilities, even if smoking is not allowed there. © Canva/Simon Lehnerer
Justin Askoul from Freital is angry. Angry because, as the founder of the cannabis cultivation association “Green Harmony’s Club”, he has not been able to find any premises for legally growing the plants for months, even though the cannabis law was passed in April and the registration of clubs has been permitted since July. However, in order to apply for official permission, you have to at the State Directorate of Saxony be able to demonstrate a property.
“I’m getting one rejection after another,” says Askoul. The law itself brings with it hurdles. For example, the Cannabis Social Club (CSC) is not allowed to be within a 200-meter radius or within sight of the entrance area of schools, children’s and youth facilities. If you take a look at the so-called “Bubatz map,” you can quickly see how many parts of Freital are lost as a result of this alone.
The “Bubatz map” is a guide to where smoking cannabis is allowed or prohibited. It is an interactive map based on the free world map “OpenStreetMap”. It was created by a software developer from Koblenz and publishes the data on the Internet without any guarantee.
Consumption is prohibited within a radius of 100 meters around the establishments in question; the radius is doubled again at the location of a CSC, even though smoking is not even allowed on site in the CSC. The map can be changed in the settings so that the radius is increased to 200 meters. Then there is not much space between the prohibited zones.
The red circles mark the prohibited zones due to the legal distance radius of a CSC of 200 meters from schools, children’s and youth facilities and playgrounds. © bubatzkarte.de
The CSC in Pirna is in a similar situation, unable to find premises due to extensive no-go zones and landlords’ reservations. Which brings us to the second major problem – the ongoing stigmatization of the plant.
Cannabis, weed, grass, dope. Many people associate this with shady hooded characters who sell small plastic bags on dark street corners. And the consumers are usually sluggish unemployed people with no prospects. CSC founder Askoul is trying to change this false image among Freital’s landlords. With little success.
“When we visited a property, we always appeared very serious, neatly dressed and friendly. Most of the time everything was fine at first, even when we admitted that we would be growing cannabis there. The rejections came afterwards,” says Askoul.
He wants to combat exactly what creates the advantages. “The goal is to displace the black market and give people safe, legal access to cannabis. Then no one will have to go to the street dealer around the corner anymore,” says the CSC founder.
He has now lost around a quarter of the club’s members because things simply cannot progress without a clubhouse where people can grow their own produce. If no property can be found for the “Green Harmonys Club”, he sees the club’s future as bleak.
