Editor's Note: It's not enough that cannabis businesses are at risk for product theft, they're a target for the large amounts of cash they are forced to handle and store due to the lack of banking services available to them. As this article from The Fiscal Times highlights, dispensary staff can be in danger. According to The Times, the biggest fear of Bruce Nassau, who runs five marijuana retail shops in Denver, "is that his employees will be robbed, injured or killed while working in the cash-only shops or depositing cash."
“You’re trying to deposit thousands and thousands of dollars at a time,” he said in The Times report. “Any Tom, Dick or Harry can come up and hit you over the head.”
Until banks can feel comfortable enough that they will not be charged with money laundering for a product that is federally illegal, this will continue to be a horrible threat to those businesses–and the lives of the people that work for them–in the marijuana industry.
In the meantime, cannabis businesses can do little but try to protect themselves as best they can, via armored trucks to transport cash, highly secure safes for both product and cash (ideally in separate safes), and beef up their security to protect their product and their employees.
Those looking to protect their businesses via increased security can benefit from Cannabis Business Times' special report, "Beyond Compliance: A Comprehensive Guide to Security for Cannabis Businesses," penned by a well-known marijuana business security expert Noah Stokes from CannaGuard Security. As Stokes stresses in the report, meeting security requirements for compliance upon initial inspections is easy, but when you throw in product displays and customers (for dispensaries) and lots of plants (for cultivation facilities), camera views are increasingly obscured, allowing more opportunity for theft. Cannabis business owners need to take their security to the next level in order to avoid theft and to protect the safety of themselves and their employees.Â
The nation’s rapidly expanding legal marijuana industry, which operates in 23 states and the District of Columbia, enters a new year facing a multibillion-dollar question: What to do with all the millions in cash it collects each week?
Nearly all of the nation’s banks refuse to take money from marijuana sales or offer basic checking or credit card services to the industry for fear they’ll be shut down by federal authorities, for whom marijuana remains an illegal narcotic. The banks won’t do business with growers, processors, retail shops and medical dispensaries, nor with their employees and contractors.
“It’s the biggest problem we have,” said Taylor West, deputy director of the National Cannabis Industry Association, many of whose 800 members are awash in $5, $10 and $20 bills and change and no bank to put them in.
