Washington is a pot pioneer. Voters approved adult recreational use in 2012 and the first retail stores opened two years later. But as proponents get ready to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the first shop’s opening, the party’s not complete: A decade on, cannabis retailers can’t use the banking services other legal businesses enjoy, and that omission is endangering lives.
As pot shops proliferated, thieves wasted no time figuring out that the banking restrictions meant one thing: Cash. Robberies, burglaries and now smash-and-grab thefts with stolen vehicles are a plague on cannabis retailers and employees. In a one-week stretch of 2022, three people were killed in Washington during cannabis store robberies. Owners and employees have reported terrifying encounters at gunpoint and massive property damage and cleanup bills.
“It makes absolutely no sense that legal businesses are being forced to operate entirely in cash, and it’s dangerous — and sometimes even fatal — for employees behind the register,” U.S. Sen. Patty Murray told The Associated Press in 2022.
Now, Murray is a co-sponsor of the badly needed revised Secure and Fair Enforcement Banking Act, which would allow pot retailers access to the same banking instruments as any other entrepreneur. She’s also one of several lawmakers reintroducing the Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act, which would strike marijuana from the list of federally controlled substances.
Because pot is not uniformly allowed at the federal level, banks mostly refuse to do business with folks who sell it under threat of prosecution. Banks could lose their deposit insurance protection and their employees could be penalized. And in many states, cannabis companies can’t deduct most business expenses, so they face a huge tax burden
This is unacceptable, especially since it can be solved. The SAFE Banking Act would allow state-legal cannabis retailers access to banking services. Along with protecting banks from prosecution, it also allows them to decline to do business with people in the pot business if they choose, even if recreational or medicinal consumption for adults is legal in their state.
When cannabis becomes legal in a state, it is regulated and taxed, like any other business. Yet employees of legal cannabis retailers are subject to dangers other kinds of employees are not, because their employers are not treated like others engaging in legal commerce. Passing the cannabis bill would bring the federal government in line with most constituents’ wishes, but the banking bill is likely easier to enact and is definitely more urgent because it would save lives.
