CHICAGO — The state treasurer pushed Monday for new regulations allowing banks to handle cash from the legal cannabis industry.
"We need to make it legal for the legal cannabis industry to use banks and credit unions," said Treasurer Michael Frerichs at a news conference in the Thompson Center in downtown Chicago.
Frerichs pointed out that "33 states have some form of legal cannabis," medical or recreational or both, yet they're not permitted to use credit cards or banks with federal charters due to the Trump administration's strict enforcement of laws against banking revenue from what is still considered an illegal substance nationally.
"This defies logic," Frerichs said. "We have an industry that handles money hiding in the shadows because banking rules built decades ago haven't kept up with changes of behavior and law.
"We have a cash industry with more than $136 million in sales in 2018 that is now ripe for theft, fraud, and tax evasion," he added.
According to Frerichs and state Rep. Kelly Cassidy of Chicago, one state bank was handling 85 percent of the business under the Illinois medical-marijuana law. "As the Trump administration ramped up threats," Cassidy said, "that bank got nervous about potential backlash" and backed out of the business.
Cassidy and state Sen. Toi Hutchinson of Olympia Fields are sponsoring bills in both houses of the General Assembly that would prevent state regulators from cracking down on banks that accept money made from legal cannabis.
"This is something we just have to do," Hutchinson said.
All emphasized this had nothing to do with the ongoing debate on whether to legalize recreational marijuana in Illinois.
"As this industry grows, the problem grows," added Cassidy, who has also sponsored legalization legislation in the General Assembly.
Frerichs has been fighting the battle for two years, since the Trump administration threatened "greater enforcement" of federal laws against banking cannabis proceeds.
Independent companies such as CannaTrac have tried to fill the gap with its CannaCard, specifically aimed at taking cash out of the cannabis industry.