Eric Holder says U.S. banks will be able to accept accounts from state-legal marijuana operations

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In what would be a major shift towards the acceptance of cannabis by the federal government, Attorney General Eric Holder yesterday announced that banks and credit card companies would soon be allowed to open accounts with state-legal cannabis operations.
For years banks have denied or closed accounts with medical dispensaries because banks are federally insured and are barred from dealing with money they know comes from a federally-illegal operation. It’s caused the businesses to become cash-heavy targets for robberies in California and Colorado.


Holder acknowledged that issue at a conference at the University of Virginia yesterday:
“You don’t want just huge amounts of cash in these places,” he said. “They want to be able to use the banking system. And so we will be issuing some regulations I think very soon to deal with that issue. There’s a public safety component to this,” he said. “Huge amounts of cash – substantial amounts of cash just kind of lying around with no place for it to be appropriately deposited – is something that would worry me just from a law enforcement perspective.”
There’s no timeline other than “soon”, which we know from the months-long delay in his response to Washington and Colorado passing their laws in 2012 could mean that the banking issue might not surface until the summertime.
Of course, the Pro-prohibition and criminalization lobby had a hissy.
“We are in the midst of creating a corporate, for-profit marijuana industry that has to rely on addiction for profit,” Kevin Sabet, co-founder of the anti-legalization group Smart Approaches to Marijuana and guy who clearly wants to tell others how to enjoy their lives responsibly, told Reuters. “That’s a much bigger issue than whether these stores take American Express.”
Maybe he’s just pissed because taking the huge lumps of cash away from the dispensaries could decrease crime around dispensaries – an issue Project SAM has touted in the past.
Or maybe it’s because the banking issue fix could turn out to be a major foothold for cannabis towards mainstream acceptance. The additional interest from cannabis revenue for these banks will be intertwined with the economy and not something that bankers funding politicians in Washington would willingly give up in the foreseeable future.

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