Attorney General Jeff Sessions reverses Cole Memo....bad for pot enthusiasts
With over half the states in the US having some form of legal marijuana whether it's just for medical purposes or it is legal for adults to partake in recreationally, these states all have one think in common which is the need to do safe cannabis banking. Attorney General Jeff Sessions reversed the Obama-era regulatory protection installed in 2014 known as Cole's Memo. It allowed for banks to do business with cannabis based businesses as long as those businesses were in compliance with the memo and state law.
In Rhode Island and Cape Cod two medical dispensaries have been forced now to just accept cash and checks. The bank in Massachusetts that they were using has decided to stop processing their debit and credit transactions.
The two Senators from Colorado have been meeting with representatives from the US Treasury department and with Jeff Sessions himself asking them not to touch cannabis banking.
California is a state that just became fully recreational for those over 21. California is having a massive cash infusion in it's cannabis industry because it's now legal for recreational use, but they are having big problems finding banks to take care of the cash flow. Some dispensaries are going the route of circumventing banks all together. Dispensaries want to allow for customers to pay in either bitcoin, potcoin, or hempcoin. The reversal is hampering the efforts of California Gov. Jerry Brown's attempt to create a network of banks within the state that would be willing to take in all this cash that the cannabis industry is generating.
The real solution to this problem is the federal government removing marijuana off the schedule 1 list. Eventually this will happen but I don't think it's going to happen as long as Jeff Sessions is Attorney General. Where government fails is where the ingenuity of the pot community begins. As a fellow enthusiast I will be buying my share of potcoin in order to help people process transactions in a safe manner. Plus, it's a good investment opportunity given that Sessions is hard core against pot.
http://www.thecannabist.co/2018/01/11/rhode-island-medical-marijuana-banking/96566/
http://www.thecannabist.co/2018/01/12/colorado-michael-bennet-cory-gardner-marijuana-banking/96635/
Its all about a money grab! They see it as free easy money. They let everyone think it was safe to bank so the could have a baseline of what kinds of money were involved and who's got the money. Now they know who has the money, they are going to start the civil asset forfeitures. They see it as free money waiting to be harvested.
Hi @OriginalWorks
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It's going to be a heck of a fight for it to get taken off that Schedule 1 with our current administration. A lot of the establishment is either against it for 'moral' reasons or immoral ones (special interest group donations).
It's also hard to get through the FDA because it's a complex molecule that has to have pretty much all permutations tested. And the farm where they grow the federal weed is an absolute shit-show.
For now, we can only hope the economic pressures of the places where it's currently legal will help to push it through our federal government. Gonna be a hard year for financing a lot of operations though...