The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is convening focus groups comprised of marijuana businesses to better understand their experiences with access to banking services under federal prohibition.
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
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