Editorial | Use opportunity of Biden’s ganja move

President Joe Biden’s pardon last week of Americans convicted for simple possession of marijuana under federal law is a welcome first step. But it does not take the United States nearly far enough. Indeed, it is in Jamaica’s interest that Mr Biden be encouraged to aggressively lobby Congress to legalise, or at least decriminalise, ganja nationally, and for the Senate to pass the bill to provide marijuana-related businesses easy access to banking services.

In the meantime, the administration should move quickly on lowering the classification of marijuana from a “class 1 drug”, a designation which places it in the same category as psychotropics like heroin and LSD, which means that, based on the standing definition, it has “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse”. That, on the face of it, is counter to the emerging evidence.

Jamaica should perhaps also encourage the administration to reconsider the fact that the pardon does not apply to non-citizens, thus continuing to make them susceptible to deportation if convicted for marijuana possession at the federal level. Many Jamaicans could be caught in that net.

It is a paradox of the United States that, although 47 US states and territories have either legalised or decriminalised ganja for recreational or medical use, creating a formal industry worth nearly US$30 billion, the drug remains illegal federally. For instance, a person can be charged under federal law for the possession or transportation, or on some related offence, if found with the drug on federal property, such as in a national park, where federal law holds sway. The same could happen in a state with legalised ganja, if the charge were in the context of a federally funded programme.

FINANCIAL SERVICES

These contradictions between state and federal laws have prevented the US marijuana industry from adequately accessing financial services, with reverberations globally, including in Jamaica. Generally, American banks and insurance companies are subject to federal regulation. They could be subject to penalties, including heavy fines and the loss of their licences, if they provide services to illegal businesses. Which, from a federal standpoint, is what the companies that sell marijuana, and the plant’s derivatives, are.

Fearing these outcomes, big American banks avoid providing services to ganja companies. The upshot: America’s ganja business is essentially a cash industry. Without credit card and direct debit or similar services, marijuana stores often have stacks of cash on hand, becoming targets of armed robbers.

The spin-off of this regulatory conundrum for Jamaica is that domestic banks have similarly declined services to the island’s decriminalised ganja industry, or do so limitedly. They fear being shunned by their American counterparts and other big global banks that operate in the United States, and are scrutinised by US regulators, who, presumably, are concerned that the industry might be used as a conduit for money laundering.

The US House of Representatives has several times passed iterations of the SAFE Banking Act, which would provide protection from penalties by regulators for financial institutions that service cannabis-linked businesses. Ganja earnings would no longer, a priori, be proceeds of a crime. However, the Senate has so far taken up neither the House’s nor its own bill.

LOBBY

If the Democrats retain the Senate after next month’s mid-term elections, Jamaica should ask its friends in New York and Washington to lobby their ally, Senate President Chuck Schumer, to push the SAFE Banking Act up the chamber’s agenda. Its passage would be a fillip to Jamaica’s faltering ganja industry.

Mr Biden’s limited pardon will cover an estimated 6,500, going back to the early 1990s, but some immigration activists warn that non-citizens, potentially including green card holders, can be subject to deportation for marijuana possession convictions, even if it involved relatively small amounts. These arguments deserve serious attention, especially against the backdrop of Mr Biden’s observation that while white, black and brown people used ganja at similar rates, “black and brown people are arrested, prosecuted and convicted at disproportionately higher rates”.

Maybe now that Mr Biden has gone part of the way in delivering on his campaign promise on ganja, Jamaica’s banks will use it as a signal to be proactive in engaging the domestic industry in regaining some of the momentum it lost since the days, over four decades ago, of the pioneering pharmacological work of the scientists Manley and West, and when, among recreational users, Jamaica’s ganja was the global brand of choice – the Blue Mountain coffee of marijuana.