Marijuana Moment
With bipartisan cannabis banking legislation dead for the session, GAO is circulating a survey as it prepares to bring together virtual focus groups in January or February 2025.
The effort seems responsive to a request from Sens. Raphael Warnock (D-GA), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Tina Smith (D-MN) and John Fetterman (D-PA), who sent a letter to Comptroller General Gene Dodaro last December. They asked GAO to initiate a “study regarding the economic effects of the War on Drugs and the role that financial institutions can play in addressing these effects.”
“Such a study should also investigate the effects that legislation to regulate financial institutions that serve the cannabis industry would have on the country’s racial wealth gap,” the lawmakers said in the letter.
The senators listed six topics that they asked GAO to investigate as part of one or multiple studies:
- To what extent would allowing financial institutions to bank state-sanctioned cannabis significantly ameliorate any negative economic effects or disparities arising from the War on Drugs and, if so, to what degree:
- What federal actions or policies (regulatory, legislative, or otherwise) would reduce regulatory uncertainty and facilitate the role financial institutions can play in addressing the effects of policies related to the War on Drugs, specifically in communities of color who have dealt with the negative effects of these policies
- Economic effects of federal, state, and local policies to prosecute the sale, possession, use, manufacture or cultivation of cannabis, including the collateral consequences of arrests and incarceration
- Whether these economic effects differ across the country, including by race, gender, socioeconomic status, or other classifications as appropriate, and whether those economic effects have contributed to widening inequality, including of the racial wealth gap
- If economic effects exist, to what extent (if at all) communities have recovered from those economic effects, especially those communities with high rates of prosecution and incarceration under the War on Drugs
- Whether state policies to decriminalize or legalize cannabis have significantly ameliorated the negative economic effects or disparities arising from the War on Drugs and, if so, to what degree
Now GAO has posted a brief survey as it seeks to form focus groups, with five basic questions for prospective participants who are directly or indirectly involved in the state-level cannabis industry.
Read more at
