Murkowski backs bill to open banking to Alaska cannabis businesses

For more than a decade, running a legal marijuana business in Alaska has meant running on cash. The state licenses these businesses, regulates them, and taxes them — but when the excise tax comes due, owners have often had to pay it in stacks of bills, because the banking system won't touch their money. Sen. Lisa Murkowski has now signed on to a Senate bill meant to end that.

The reason for the cash is a standoff between two governments. Alaska voters legalized recreational marijuana in 2014, and the state built a whole apparatus around it: a Marijuana Control Board overseeing who grows and sells it, and a Department of Revenue collecting a tax on what's sold.

But to the federal government, marijuana is still a controlled substance, flatly illegal. Banks and credit unions answer to federal regulators, so serving a cannabis business — even a fully licensed one — can expose them to prosecution, money-laundering liability, and the loss of their federal standing. Most simply say no.

That leaves dispensaries doing nearly everything in cash: paying employees, rent, and suppliers out of the till, and storing what's left in safes. It's a compliance headache, and, more seriously, a safety problem. A storefront known to keep large amounts of cash on hand makes a target — and so does the person driving that cash across town to the tax office.

The bill would carve out a "safe harbor": an explicit promise that a bank won't be punished simply for serving a marijuana business that's legal under its own state's laws. For Alaska operators, that could finally mean ordinary bank accounts, card payments, and a way to handle taxes that doesn't involve an envelope of twenties.

It is not a cure-all, and it is far from law. A safe harbor wouldn't make marijuana federally legal, and banks would still have to meet anti-money-laundering rules and flag suspicious activity. The bill now sits in the Senate Banking Committee with no hearing scheduled — and an earlier version cleared the U.S. House a few years ago only to stall out without becoming law.