A clash of cannabis laws hovers over the mysterious May seizure of $165,620 in Missouri medical marijuana-generated cash by federal agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration. The money was being delivered across Kansas — where state law considers marijuana entirely illegal — and on its way to its final destination in a credit union in Colorado, where cannabis is legal.
While key details of the incident remain cloudy, the fact that Missouri cannabis businesses are finding creative (and risky) methods of banking their money, going as far as shipping it via van across a cannabis-unfriendly state, comes as no surprise to the Missouri Bankers Association.
That’s because there’s a good reason why multiple cannabis dispensaries would rely on a Colorado institution instead of depositing it in a local bank: For the most part, the banks here won’t take their money.
“It’s just not widespread in Missouri; they are few and far between,” says association spokesman Jackson Hataway, who sees the Kansas cash seizure as emblematic of Missouri’s lack of banking resources for cannabis businesses.
“It’s the economic scale of it,” explains Hataway. “If you’re willing to drive your funds across the state and across state lines, then you’re talking about a pretty serious business that is is trying to do something with a significant amount of cash. That’s the only time that line of thinking would make sense.”
Launched last October, Missouri’s medical marijuana industry is expected to generate more than $200 million in sales by the end of 2021. The money has to go somewhere. For multiple Kansas City dispensaries, it went into bags, which went into a van, which then made a 700-mile journey before being deposited in Colorado.
However, on May 17, that particular banking solution collided with a sheriff’s deputy in Dickinson County, Kansas, about 150 miles west of Kansas City.
According to filings in federal court (which include an affidavit submitted by a DEA agent), the deputy pulled over a driver working for Empyreal Logistics, a Pennsylvania-based cash transport company, for a traffic stop on Interstate 70.
Informed by the driver of the plan to pick up cash from cannabis businesses in Kansas City before returning to Colorado, the deputy ultimately allowed the Empyreal van to continue the journey, but he also alerted federal agents; the next day, the DEA surveilled the Empyreal employee “stopping and entering multiple state marijuana dispensaries in Kansas City.”
The affidavit describes how the very next day, the van was stopped for a second time, by the same Dickinson County deputy, leading to the seizure of $165,620.
No drugs were seized, and the affidavit does not disclose whether the driver faced criminal charges for supposedly transporting the proceeds from what the state of Kansas and the federal government consider an illegal drug operation. In September, Empyreal filed a legal claim to contest the federal government’s seizure, arguing that the cash was “legally obtained” and that the company “has done nothing … to merit forfeiture of the Subject Currency.”
The next court hearing in the case is scheduled for January, and, in the meantime, Missouri’s handful of cannabis-friendly banking and finance professionals are left to grapple with the possible implications.
David Smith, a St. Louis accountant who works with…
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