Kinda an incendiary headline when it’s just Mastercard complying with the law. From the article: "The federal government considers cannabis sales illegal, so these purchases are not allowed on our systems," Really the issue is that Marijuana should be legal at the federal level.
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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Yet it stays illegal because of conservative boomers and their fucking grand kids.
When polled, majorities are in support of legalization. If people would show up to vote more than once every 4 years we could make some actual progress on this issue. But since at least half of registered voters sit out every race, well here we are.
Worth noting that even some conservatives support legalization!
It's too bad those conservatives who do support it are the same people who vote against all of their own interests constantly.
The current president can reschedule marijuana. He won't. He claims not to be conservative, but I'm not convinced.
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And yet I bet I can buy mortgaged backed securities with a MasterCard
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Cannabis? Oh man we can't break the law. Better not chance it.
Some weird Bitcoin mortgage backed security being bought by Goldman Sachs to resell to their pension holders? Oh so good.
There should be a law prohibiting these payment companies to be picky when it comes to legal transactions.
Unfortunately, these are illegal according to the federal government, which regulates these financial institutions
Cough "regulates" cough
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This is sort of off topic but the constraints credit card companies put on porn is ridiculous. Cannabis, sadly, is illegal federally. Porn is legal everywhere in the country.
I'd very much support legislation that required payment processors to not discriminate against any firm provided the business transaction is legal.
Seriously! I have an extremely specific fetish that has been fucked up multiple times by credit card companies.
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I hope people remember these companies and politicians who attempted to blockade Cannabis businesses when it is invariably made federally legal. They will more than likely never face the consequences of their stupidity while they turn a blind eye to armed robberies that are specifically caused by these policies yet get fat on the tax revenue regardless.
The idea that we need to plead fealty to these degenerates to get them to take common sense approaches to issues that the majority of the voter base has agreed on for a decade is ridiculous. No matter how anybody personally feels about Cannabis consumption it never has and never will go away. Prohibition doesn't work, and attempting to legislate other peoples ethics is a losing gambit.
They won't. People are dumb as hell and have extremely short memories.
these companies
How is complying with current law, attempting to blockade Cannabis Businesses?
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Time to change lines of business. "We're a taco shop, but you can buy weed here in compliamce with local laws. Sorry if you receipt just says TACOS no matter what you buy. We're working on that."
Basically what dispensaries in Washington, DC do. Everything is a "donation" or an "art purchase" and the pot is a "gift". Total nonsense, but it mostly works, because DC intends to legalize recreational marijuana sales, and Congress isn't letting it happen. So it seems like enforcement is just lax.
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Step 1.) Add ATM in lobby. Step 2.) Tell customers they can't use cards because of laws. Step 3.) Customer uses debit card at ATM and then purchases weed with the cash they just used their debit card to get.
Fuck it. Not hard at all.
Yes, but the problem is that the volume of cash makes retailers a massive target. People have been killed over this, and will continue to be put in danger until customers have access to the same payment resources that all other retail businesses take for granted. This is not a trivial issue at all. There are serious real world consequences to these decisions that paint the industry in a bad light when they are a DIRECT consequence of the inaction of the federal government. We are never going back to prohibition. There is simply too much tax revenue generated, and too much public sentiment on the side of both legalization as well as ending the failed drug war policies.
Not just a massive target to criminals either. Cops are willing to pull over armored cars and take the cash when it gets transported. That money then goes through the civil asset forfeiture process, getting handed to the feds who then give some of it back to the local department through their "equitable sharing" program. Legalized theft.
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Cash is way more dangerous to hold, these stores get robbed all the time. Just let them process cards
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And the transaction fee goes right to the bank.
You get charged for a cash withdrawal? That's rare here in the UK.
Charged by the ATM and sometimes also charged by your bank for using an ATM
It’s a scam
“This is America.”
Most do. I use a bank that reimburses the costs.
America's national motto is "Yup, there's a fee for that!"
Banks are kind of shitty here - if you use another bank's ATM, your bank (or the other, or sometimes both) will charge a small fee. Usually it's something like $3, but some smaller banks and credit unions will actually pay all of those fees back, so a lot of folks don't even notice that it's there.
This specific situation is weird because it's a dispensary, though. Thanks to the vagaries of local legality and federal illegality, the dispensaries are totally good selling drugs, but the banks are very much not good openly handling the payments for those drugs. Because of this, most dispensaries will contract their debit payments through a payment processor that can register their card readers as "cashless ATMs," and who will effectively launder all of their debit transactions. The end result of this is that while the customer can pay with a card like a normal store, they end up having to choose between paying the ATM fee at the ATM, or at the register.
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Except Mastercard is lying, FinCEN has specifically issued guidance for national finance institutions (banks, credit cards, etc.) to be able to accept cannabis transactions in states that have legalized. Most of these finance institutions are just unwilling to accept the additional cost of complying with the regulations. There’s a reason why Valley National Bank is so popular with cannabis companies - it’s a national bank that follows FinCEN guidelines. It comes at a higher cost, but a lot of companies feel it’s worth it.
And this FinCEN guidance wasn’t just issued - it was issued in 2014. The only reason the cannabis industry doesn’t have widespread access to traditional finance, and why banks keep lobbying for the SAFE Banking Act, is because the banks don’t want to have to do the extra work to comply with the FinCEN guidance.
Note - I agree it’s stupid that cannabis is federally illegal and think it should be legalized (or at the very least deschedule it and let states decide if they’ll allow it). But Mastercard could choose to follow FinCEN guidance if they wanted to.
Not surprising. Well, cash still exists, right? Or Monero..
I've paid cash for weed for years. Still not legal here but that hasn't stopped me.
I used to pay cash for weed. I still do, but I used to, too.
So real talk, VISA isn't much better - if you have a business selling tobacco, cannabis, or firearm related products you have a really hard time taking payments online. Most big vendors (like Paypal, Square, etc) won't work with you once you hit $5k to $10k a year in sales (for small businesses starting out you'll slip by for a few months until you grow big enough to get manually audited).
Then you need to find special card processing banks who are approved by VISA to work with tobacco/firearm companies and go through all sorts of review before your store will be approved for processing payments.
And that's just selling hardware like pipes and accessories. I'm not even talking about the raw material itself.
This sucks, but it won't stop anyone, they'll simply switch to another service. I bet VISA's stock will pop tomorrow because of this news if it hasn't already haha
This really isn't that big of a deal anyways. Just deploy an ATM inside the shop as a courtesy. Bonus points if it's a nice machine that can give customers amounts in increments as little as $5.
Since your business has cash as it's main method of payment; it should be fairly simple to keep said ATM stocked up.
This at least would be the cheeky way to get around restrictions.
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If you think about it, do you really want a history of federal crimes recorded on your bank account...?
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ITT: Plenty of people who don’t understand how federal vs state laws work in regards to federally regulated businesses
ITT: plenty of people who don't remember 2007 or 2020. Financial forms obey the rules that they want to when they want to. The federal government works for them, not the other way around.
This has nothing to do with the law this is MasterCard deciding to not go after that market.
No dispensary here accepts anything but cash because of the legalities anyway
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