Eric Holder Wants American Banks and Legal Pot Shops to Be Buds

The legal pot business has always had a big cash problem—but (maybe) not for long.

In what marks a major marijuana policy shift, Attorney General Eric Holder said on Thursday that marijuana businesses that are in compliance with state laws should be able to access American banks. Holder added that the government will soon present guidelines to help them do so, however "the rules are not expected to give banks a greenlight to accept deposits and provide other services," The New York Times reports. Instead, they will make it clear to prosecutors that cases involving legal pot operations shouldn't be prioritized.

So don't expect pot shop owners in any of the 20 states that allow the sale of medicinal and recreational flower to start carting bushels of cash to the local Bank of America, at least not right away. Still, Holder acknowledged the inherent risks that come along with an almost entirely cash-based economy, one that's still technically illegal under federal law and unable to acquire credit.

"You don't want just huge amounts of cash in these places," Holder told an audience at the University of Virginia."They want to be able to use the banking system. “There’s a public safety component to this. 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.”

Last we checked, the US Department of Justice was considering loosening restrictions that would make it legal for banks to lend money to pot shop proprieters in Colorado and for those pot shops to then open up bank accounts in that state. The problem, of course, is that current money-laundering statutes prevent banks from dealing with the proceeds of weed sales even in states like Colorado or Washington, where selling cannabis is completely legal; the drug is still illegal under federal law.

That's why banks are still a bit skittish to cash in on weed, as it were. Senior Vice President of Regulatory Compliance at the American Bankers Association, Richard Riese, told the Times this month that banks "would want to know, for instance, that they were not 'aiding and abetting' a criminal enterprise if they provided such services."

“Banks will need a lot of detail from regulators to get the satisfaction and comfort they are looking for,” Riese added.

Never mind that narco-cash laundering is officially how big banks work now. A bank for weed is a legal bank, indeed.