Belgian "Draw Up Your Plant" Campaign for Cannabis Regulation

“The Flemish Institute for Alcohol and Drugs Questions” and our cannabis association “Draw Up Your Plant” agree on a specific problem: Belgian cannabis law is creating legal insecurity for Civil society. Draw Up Your Plant organized a very successful press moment on Thursday Juli 27. “The mother plant, seeds and clones” were the subject of our action this time. We showed the planting of the seed to grow a mother plant that'll provide clones for the Draw Up Your Plant plantation. ATV-News (Dutch): http://www.atv.be/v3/newsdetail.aspx?mid=&id=2612 [4] Foto report by Jos van Cannaclopedia: http://www.cannaclopedia.be/TUPtxtNL.htm [5] Antwerpen Apart (Dutch): http://antwerpenapart.be/archives/1630 [6] Het Nieuwsblad (Dutch): http://hardcoreharmreducer.be/picture%20library/06.07.28TUPHetNieuwsblad... [7] Oradio website (Dutch) : http://www.oradio.be/detail.php?record=3277 [8] I've put it all on my cannapage: http://www.hardcoreharmreducer.be/CannabisPage.html [9] Draw Up Your Plant isn't the only organization who finds that Belgian cannabis law creates legal insecurity for Belgian Civil society. VAD/De Druglijn (a tele-service for people with questions about drugs) released a press article on Juli 13 last month. They describe the problems with Belgian cannabis law: (Tom Evenepoel (VAD / De Druglijn) about the content of questions asked to De Druglijn) “Legislation is taken into consideration in 15% of the questions. This is even a higher percentage as with the federal drug note in 2001. Moreover, the questions continually get more specific. It no longer concerns the general question if cannabis now can be smoked or not, but about what is allowed in certain specific situation or not, and what the eventual sanction can be. We do what we can, but often it is a great challenge and sometimes even impossible to give answers to the questions about legislation..” Full article (Dutch): http://www.vad.be/docs/persbericht_druglijncijfers_05.pdf [10] According to the ministerial directive of January 2005 one can possess 3 grammes of canabis and one harvested cannabis plant. Draw Up Your Plant offers cannabis consumers a protocol enabling them to attain cannabis without trade. Each member of the organization can grow it's plant in a common plantation according to strict, yet simple rules. One man/woman one plant. Each plant in the plantation will contain a label with it's owners name on it. There are 2 ways in witch the situation for Draw Up Your Plant can evolve now: or we get a political solution, or we get a judicial solution. We don't expect our political policy makers will come up with a legislative initiative because that would be an acknowledgement of debt for bad governance earlier in this period of government. Draw Up Your Plant is in favor of a political solution, but we expect to be challenged by criminal law and fight our fight in court. We need 1500 euro if we go to court. We try to gather this money by asking a 50 euro memberships fee to people who want to become a member of our association. So we need 30 members to start with. We're doing the Draw Up Your Plant campaign since januari of this year. We did a monthly press release and so now and then an event (like the one last week). We where in newspapers, magazines, on radio and television and websites. We now have several hundreds of supporters from all over the country. But we only have 24 members until now. Manny of our supporters are concerned mainly about the fact if they're gonna have a harvest-ready plant for the 50 euro they've paid. People often only think short term (My weed!!!) and one cannot understand that you have to arrange this legal business first before you can do your grow in relaxed surroundings. We try to get our association Draw Up Your Plant regulated. If we succeed then we can get thousands of cannabis associations in all kind of forms and celebrate the end of cannabis prohibition. This is really possible just because of this unclear, unworkable cannabis law. In the first place there is the fact that at present nobody can explain how cannabis laws are to be interpreted. Secondly, Judges suffer under this problem (how should they rule?) and maybe want to send a signal to the legislators responsible for this and let us go. (cheer) :jh (cheer) Stijn Goossens Philippe De Craene Joep Oomen TREKT UW PLANT (vzw i.o) STAD/ENCOD/VOLVOX Lange Lozanastraat 14 2018 Antwerpen Tel. 03 237 7436 GSM: 0479 982271 / 0486 499 453 E-mail:encod@glo.be / TrektUwPlant@yahoo.com [11] Website: www.encod.org [12] / www.hardcoreharmreducer.be [13] / www.cannaclopedia.be [14] HaRdCOREhARMREdUCER BreaklinePeerSupport InternationalDrugUserActivists TrektUwPlant!!!