Sometimes I’ll write about cannabis banking when I’m working on a project for a bank or credit union, but newsworthy developments on cannabis banking seldom seem to drop. Yesterday, however, we had a development worth covering: a Congressional Subcommittee added cannabis banking protections to a critical government spending bill. A GOP-chaired Subcommittee, no less. Marijuana
We are helping build out another cannabis banking program here in Oregon. My law firm has done a series of these for credit unions (“CU”s) and other financial institutions (“FIs”) going back to 2014. We have also handled a good bit of hemp banking work– mostly in 2019 and 2020 before that industry cratered. In
I’m pretty sure that more ink has been spilled on the Secure and Fair Enforcement Act (“SAFE Banking”), than any other proposed cannabis law. It just won’t pass and it just won’t die. Specifically, SAFE Banking was introduced in 2017 and it passed the House seven times (seven times!) with bipartisan support since 2019. The
Huge news yesterday. Huge! The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has officially recommended that marijuana be rescheduled, from Schedule I to Schedule III of the federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA). This means that the country’s top health agency has finally conceded that cannabis has medical value, and isn’t a drug of abuse
The Safe Banking Act, also known as the Secure and Fair Enforcement Banking Act (SAFE Banking Act), is sorely needed legislation to address the critical issue of financial services being denied to marijuana businesses that operate in the state-legalized industries. We’ve written extensively about the SAFE Banking Act over the past several years. See here,
As we blogged about last week, the SAFE Banking Act is trying to claw its way back from the dead during this lame duck session of Congress. Interestingly, on December 2, Punchbowl News reported that the Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a memo outlining its “issues” with the SAFE Banking Act. Here’s the memo (“Memo”).
As we’ve written about over the past several years, there have been consistent rallying cries for common-sense banking reform for the cannabis industry. The SAFE Banking Act, which would allow federally regulated financial institutions to work with state-legal cannabis businesses, has been passed by the U.S. House of Representatives a whopping seven times. However, the
After a vote last week, the National Conference of State Legislators (NCSL) adopted a revised cannabis policy measure (the “Directive“) which supports federally descheduling cannabis, as well as cannabis banking reform. At this point, it’s abundantly clear that the states have moved beyond cannabis prohibition. The NCSL is a non-partisan organization that represents all state
The SAFE Banking Act has languished in Congress since early 2017, a victim of political gridlock and division, as well as political wrangling over broad approaches to cannabis legalization. We last covered the SAFE Banking Act in February, when it looked as though 2022 would be the sixth year in which this bill would die.
Cannabis companies are largely behind the curve in Web3, but in the past few months some top cannabis companies have emerged in the Web3 ecosystem to join the old guard. The connection between cannabis and Web3 may not be apparent at first glance, but both industries are relatively nascent, semi-regulated, and attracting some of the
