Contentious legality in decentralized governance: The rise and decline of cannabis social clubs in Spain

Abstract

Background: Cannabis social clubs (CSCs) emerged in Spain in the 1990s as community-based, non-profit al- ternatives to illicit cannabis markets, offering adults a closed-circuit system for collective cultivation and dis- tribution. Their rapid expansion after 2012 relied on self-regulation and strategic socio-legal mobilization that leveraged ambiguities in criminal and administrative law. Their trajectory can be understood as a case of contentious politics, shaped by sustained interaction between grassroots-actors, courts, and public authorities within Spain’s decentralized governance system. Methods: This study adopts a socio-legal and policy-analysis approach, synthesizing academic literature, judicial rulings, policy documents, legislative debates, and cannabis movement records. Through systematic triangula- tion, it reconstructs how activists, courts, and subnational authorities co-produced—and ultimately closed—a contested legal space for collective cannabis supply. Findings: CSCs expanded most strongly in Catalonia and the Basque Country, where subnational openness to policy experimentation and demands for political autonomy enabled alternative regulatory practices. Local and regional authorities promoted harm-reduction frameworks and self-regulatory mechanisms that generated temporary zones of tolerance. The Basque experience remained closer to cooperative and public-health princi- ples, while Catalonia’s rapid expansion moved toward more commercialized practices, triggering intensive scrutiny. From 2015 onward, Supreme Court rulings curtailed the jurisprudential basis of CSCs, and subsequent regional laws were annulled by the Constitutional Court, reaffirming centralized authority over criminal law. Conclusions: The Spanish case highlights both the innovative potential and the structural fragility of bottom-up drug policy experimentation. It shows how legal ambiguity within multilevel governance can enable civic innovation yet remain vulnerable to centralized judicial closure.