BANKING

LET’S BREAK IT DOWN

If you’ve ever been to a cannabis dispensary, you may have noticed that paying can sometimes get… weird. That’s because federal law prohibits banks from providing financial services to businesses that are involved with Schedule 1 drugs, and cannabis is still a Schedule 1 drug. As a result, cannabis businesses need to operate exclusively in cash or find complicated ways to legally work within the restrictions.

• Cannabis businesses are attractive targets for robbery since they tend to have a lot of cash on hand. This puts employees and customers in danger.
• Without access to traditional loans from banks, it’s even harder for people who don’t have a lot of money to open cannabis businesses. Wealthy people with access to different sources of funding don’t need to rely on banks to enter the industry.
• Legalizing cannabis at the federal level would solve the banking problem, but it’s not the only way to address it. In fact, a bill that would quickly resolve this issue—called the SAFE Banking Act—has already been passed by the House of Representatives and is currently awaiting a vote in the Senate.