Hacker News Reader

Comment by vorpalhex | Hacker News Reader

That's incorrect. Those states explicitly legalized the possession and consumption of marijuana. That legalization is in conflict with the federal prohibition - so consuming marijuana in those instances is not a state crime (any more then walking down the street or eating cake is) but might still be a federal crime in those cases where the federal government has the ability to charge you (interstate commerce).

View on HN

Thats my understanding of it. I'm in Massachusetts and one of the problem this new industry faces is banking. Banks are federally regulated many won't touch it (there are some "know you customer" anti money landing type laws). Thus it becomes a cash business, leading to all sorts of problems.

Being Massachusetts though, although technically it should be legal since july, they haven't issued any permits to allow it to be sold. Those issues should be resolved with luck in another 2-3 years...

>Being Massachusetts though, although technically it should be legal since july, they haven't issued any permits to allow it to be sold. Those issues should be resolved with luck in another 2-3 years...

Being Massachusetts the licensing issues will be cleared up once the appropriate pockets are lined or once a relative of a state legislator starts trying to get a license, not a minute sooner or later.

There are stores in some of the legalized states that are processing debit card transactions through some company in NYC. I expect it will be possible in MA stores.

The debit card thing is complex, and might not stand up long term.

Essentially, to the bank the debit card transactions look like they're coming from an ATM. That 'ATM' is owned by a wholly owned subsidiary of the dispensary that, IDK, ostensibly sells t shirts or something. Then the 'cash' out of the 'ATM' is immediately used in your transaction.

There's no way the banks involved don't know what's going on, but there's just enough plausible deniability that they're going with it for the moment. But all it takes is one dropping the hammer on one instance of this and everyone will be back to pure cash.

What's the difference between being legalized and being not prohibited?

Saying that it's federally prohibited within the state is dubious, because of the issue of states rights. Constitutional scholars would argue the federal government has little to no ability to control what substances a state wants to prohibit within the state itself. The only way this was worked around to begin with is the stretching of the interstate commerce law, which only applies when crossing state lines.

Only if a court made a ruling on it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com