A federal bill to normalize banking for the cannabis industry has been reintroduced in Congress. The Secure and Fair Enforcement (SAFE) Banking Act, which would provide a create a legal framework for banking and financial services to serve state-legal cannabis businesses, has passed the House of Representatives several times but has never been voted on by the full Senate. 

 In a statement, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), who first co-sponsored the legislation in 2017, said lawmakers “must make sure that businesses in states where marijuana is legal…have access to bank accounts and other financial services.”   

“I’m proud to support this legislation that will help Nevada small businesses and make our communities safer in the long run. It’s time to finally get this bill done.” — Cortez Masto in a press release 

The SAFE Banking Act would protect banks and their officers who provide financial services to legitimate, state-sanctioned cannabis businesses from criminal prosecution and liability and asset forfeiture, while maintaining banks’ right to choose not to offer those services. It would also provide protections for hemp and hemp-derived CBD related businesses and require banks to comply with current Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) guidance.  

Additionally, this bill would prevent federal banking regulators from prohibiting, penalizing or discouraging a bank from providing financial services to state-sanctioned and regulated cannabis business, or associated businesses, such as lawyers or landlords that provide services to the sector; terminating or limiting a bank’s federal deposit insurance primarily because the bank is providing services to a state-sanctioned cannabis business or associated business; recommending or incentivizing a bank to halt or downgrade providing any kind of banking services to these businesses; and taking any action on a loan to an owner or operator of a cannabis-related business. 

The proposal is co-sponsored in the Senate by Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Steve Daines (R-MT), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Dan Sullivan (R-AK), Kevin Cramer (R-ND) and Patty Murray (D-WA).   

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Josh Turek, the Democratic nominee in a U.S. Senate race in Iowa this year, says it’s time to federally legalize, regulate and tax marijuana.

The candidate, currently a state representative, told voters at an Iowa State University football tailgate that he thinks cannabis’s longtime restrictive Schedule I status is “ridiculous.”

Turek told one man that he liked a cannabis leaf hat he was wearing. That prompted a woman to tell the Senate candidate that he should “fix” federal marijuana laws, adding that she has “so much pain” and “would like to be able to take gummies at night.”

Turek, who was born with spina bifida and is in a wheelchair, said he has “dealt with so many individuals with disabilities” and that cannabis is “one of the few ways that they see relief from their spasms.”

He suggested that marijuana isn’t harmful enough to be prohibited “in the grand scheme of things, when you’re looking at the health implications from tobacco or from alcohol.”

“Or opioids,” the woman voter chimed in. “I do not want to take opioids.”

“Absolutely,” Turek replied. Policymakers will “always reach out for Big Pharma,” he said, but not for “anything natural.”

“I would love to be able to address that federal level,” the candidate said. “I think it should be legalized and regulated, and let’s tax it. You’ve seen it with other states.”

In 2023, Turek cosponsored a bill in the Iowa House of Representatives to legalize adult-use marijuana and expand the state’s current medical cannabis program by allowing doctors to recommend it for any medical condition they see fit.

Turek’s opponent for the Senate seat, U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson (R), voted against a bill to federally legalize marijuana on the House floor in 2022. She did, however, support separate legislation in 2021 to ease the cannabis industry’s access to banking services.

Meanwhile in Iowa, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Rob Sand recently explained why he thinks marijuana should be legalized and treated like alcohol, even if he thinks it’s “dangerous.”

“Marijuana is a dangerous drug,” he said. “You shouldn’t abuse it, but we also shouldn’t throw people in prison just for using it. We should treat it the way we treat alcohol. Alcohol is a dangerous drug. You shouldn’t abuse it, but we don’t throw you in prison just for having a beer when you get home.”

Separately, Iowa regulators are circulating proposed rules changes to remove the residency requirement for patients in the state’s medical cannabis program while also ensuring that military veterans qualify for reduced registration fees.

The residency-focused part of the regulatory change from the state Department of Health and Human Services is meant to comply with provisions of a bill that Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) signed into law in June.

In addition to allowing out-of-state residents to register in the medical cannabis program if they have a certification from an Iowa healthcare provider legislation, that legislation also doubles the number of medical cannabis dispensaries that are allowed to operate in the state.

Also this session, Iowa lawmakers considered a bill to create a state-regulated therapeutic psilocybin program for patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Last year, the governor vetoed earlier legislation that would have allowed doctors in the state to immediately prescribe a synthetic form of psilocybin in the event of federal approval of the psychedelic substance by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), arguing that it “surrenders state authority to make an informed determination about classification to federal officials.”

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The U.S. Senate has voted to retain a one-month delay on the federal crackdown on intoxicating hemp products by tabling an amendment to a federal funding bill that would have kept the ban at its original start date of November 12, The Hill reports.

Introduced by North Carolina Sen. Ted Budd (R) and nearly a dozen bipartisan lawmakers, senators rejected the amendment overnight on Saturday in a 61-32 vote.

While President Trump (R) signed the ban into law as part of a funding bill to reopen the federal government last year, the White House has since pushed for lawmakers to change or delay the rules to protect full-spectrum hemp products, which the new restrictions would target once the ban takes effect.

Hemp industry representatives are hopeful that the delay will give the extra time they need to pursue federal regulations to save the multi-billion-dollar hemp industry.

”The next chapter begins today. The Hemp Beverage Alliance stands ready to work with Congress, the White House and stakeholders throughout the country to pass federal legislation that is strong, sensible, reliable, and prioritizes public safety.” — Christopher Lackner, founder and president of the Hemp Beverage Alliance, in a statement

Meanwhile, Budd called the nationwide sale of intoxicating hemp products “a public health crisis that deserves this Senate’s immediate attention.”

“Our children should never be the testing ground for an industry willing to exploit a loophole in federal law for profit,” he said in the report.

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Congress voted last year to strip most hemp THC products of their federal legal status, starting November 12. On Saturday morning, the Senate pushed that date to December 11. Here is what the ban actually does, what the vote changed and why this extension is probably the last one.

At 3:35 on Saturday morning, after a week of political fights and a threatened holdup of the entire government funding bill, the US Senate voted to give the hemp industry 29 more days.

Three days earlier, a White House official had already told Senate Republicans there would not be another 29.

If you have not been following this fight closely, here is the short version of what is at stake, and then what actually happened.

First: What Is the Hemp Ban?

In 2018, the Farm Bill legalized hemp, defined as cannabis containing no more than 0.3% delta-9 THC by dry weight. Nobody in Congress seemed to anticipate what would happen next. Chemists worked out how to convert legal hemp-derived CBD into intoxicating cannabinoids the statute had not mentioned: delta-8, delta-10, HHC, THC-O. Growers realized THCA flower is not intoxicating until you heat it, which meant it technically fell inside the definition. Beverage makers built a THC seltzer category from scratch.

Within a few years, that gap became a multibillion-dollar industry selling weed-adjacent products in gas stations, smoke shops, liquor stores and grocery aisles, including in states where marijuana itself is still illegal.

Late last year, Congress moved to close it. Tucked into the spending bill that ended the record-long government shutdown was Section 781 of P.L. 119-37, a rewrite of the federal definition of hemp. Trump signed it into law, though his administration would later push Congress to postpone the very restrictions he had approved. The provision was championed by Sen. Mitch McConnell, the same senator who wrote hemp into the 2018 Farm Bill in the first place.

The new rule does two things. It measures total THC, which counts THCA rather than ignoring it. And it caps finished consumable products at 0.4 milligrams per container of total THC plus other cannabinoids with similar effects.

The 0.4-milligram cap, not the word “ban,” is the mechanism. A typical hemp gummy carries 10 milligrams. A THC seltzer carries between 2 and 10. Almost nothing on the market clears 0.4.

The US Hemp Roundtable has estimated roughly 95% of existing hemp cannabinoid products fall outside the new definition. The effective date was November 12, one year after enactment. We broke down the fine print here.

Then Came the Fight Over Delaying It

The hemp industry spent nine months lobbying to get the law changed before it landed. It did not get a rewrite. What it got instead was an attempt at more time.

Senate leaders released a stopgap funding bill on August 2 to keep the federal government open through December 11. Inside it, at the White House’s request, was a provision pushing most of the hemp restrictions to that same date. Cannabinoids that the plant cannot naturally produce would still lose federal hemp status on November 12. Everything else would get 29 extra days.

Sen. Ted Budd, a North Carolina Republican, filed an amendment to strip it out and hold the original date. He called intoxicating hemp a “public health crisis” and held up posters on the Senate floor showing THC packaging that resembled Oreos and Skittles as evidence that the hemp industry’s goal is to make children “addicted to these disguised substances.” His amendment collected 13 cosponsors and threatened to derail the entire funding bill and the Senate’s August recess. We covered that standoff here.

What Happened Saturday

Budd’s amendment died at 3:35 a.m.

The Senate voted 61-32 to table it. The motion came from Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat who wrote the delay provision in the first place. Twenty-four minutes later, the chamber passed the underlying continuing resolution 90-6, according to the Senate’s official record.

That means the Senate bill would push most of the November 12 restrictions to December 11, if the House agrees and Trump signs it. Neither has happened. Until both do, November 12 remains the operative federal date.

Read past the vote count, though, and the week produced four things that matter more than the calendar.

1. Nobody Voted the Way You’d Guess

Start with the roll call, because it scrambles every assumption about who sits where on cannabis policy.

Eleven Democrats voted with Budd to keep his amendment alive: Kirsten Gillibrand, Dick Durbin, Catherine Cortez Masto, Maggie Hassan, Martin Heinrich, Mazie Hirono, Jeff Merkley, Alex Padilla, Jacky Rosen, Adam Schiff and Lisa Blunt Rochester. Republicans including Rand Paul, Steve Daines and Tim Sheehy voted to protect the delay.

Merkley and Padilla lined up with Ted Budd. Rand Paul lined up with Amy Klobuchar. Hemp has managed to scramble both parties at once.

Paul, the delay’s loudest Republican defender, accused his colleagues of wildly exaggerating the risk. He told reporters for the Associated Press and PBS NewsHour after the lunch that the senators pushing to keep the ban on schedule were behaving “like they watched ‘Reefer Madness’ in 1937.”

On the other side, Sen. Tom Cotton called the products “gas-station marijuana candy” during a closed-door Republican lunch that Sen. Josh Hawley later described to MS NOW as a “big blow-up.”

2. The White House Signaled This Is the Last Delay

The most important thing of the week happened three days before the vote, in a room the industry was not in.

James Braid, the White House director of legislative affairs, attended that Republican lunch. Cotton, Sen. Pete Ricketts and Budd pressed him on why the administration had reversed course on a law the president himself signed. According to Axios, NBC News and Punchbowl News, all citing people present, Braid committed that there would be no further delays beyond the one in the funding bill.

The pressure went beyond the lunch. Trump personally called Budd on Tuesday night, after the senator filed his amendment. According to a Senate aide cited in reports of the call, the president discussed setting up federal regulations for hemp but did not directly ask Budd to withdraw it.

December 11 is not a waypoint. On the current signals, it is the cliff.

That matters because the delay exists almost entirely because the administration wanted it. The Hill reported the provision went in at the White House’s request, and Trump has publicly pushed Congress to fix hemp rather than kill it, writing on Truth Social that lawmakers must “get this done RIGHT and FAST, especially for those who saw that CBD helps them.” Take that support away in December and the coalition for another temporary extension gets substantially weaker.

Congress has had nine months to write a permanent fix. It has produced the Barr-Craig Lawful Hemp Protection Act, which would replace the ban with federal potency limits, age restrictions and labeling rules; a competing draft circulating from Rep. James Comer; and a stack of delay proposals. None has advanced far enough to replace the November law.

Why the Reversal Is Being Questioned

There is another reason the White House’s sudden investment in the issue has drawn scrutiny.

In June, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles’s younger daughter Caroline married Bret Worley, the chief executive of MC Nutraceuticals, a hemp company that describes itself as the largest global supplier of cannabinoids. MS NOW reported that Worley’s company urged industry allies to press lawmakers for the delay, and The New York Times reported that once the provision was added to the funding bill, MC Nutraceuticals told prospective customers the industry now had “a seat at the table.”

The White House denies that the family connection influenced its position. Spokesman Kush Desai said Wiles “has never lobbied in favor of this or any other position on hemp with Capitol Hill,” and that the administration is guided by the interests of veterans and patients. Neither Wiles nor Worley responded to requests for comment from MS NOW, and MC Nutraceuticals did not respond to the Times.

None of that establishes that the delay was written to benefit anyone’s business. It does explain why senators in both parties spent the week asking harder questions about an abrupt reversal.

3. The Cannabis Industry Is Split

Hemp groups treated Saturday’s vote as permission to keep building.

“This morning’s vote was a huge turning point in the pursuit of safe, responsible federal regulation,” said Christopher Lackner, founder and president of the Hemp Beverage Alliance, which represents 375 members across the US and Canada. “The next chapter begins today.”

Thomas Winstanley, president of Edibles.com, part of Edible Brands, the parent company of Edible Arrangements, was more measured.

“Congress did not solve the hemp issue today. It preserved the opportunity to solve it correctly. A delay is not a destination.”

Thomas Winstanley, president, Edibles.com

Winstanley said in a statement that the ban would have “increased consumer risk by driving demand toward the illicit market” while undermining farmers, manufacturers and retailers. That is a central argument from the hemp industry, and the Senate just gave it four extra weeks to land.

But parts of the state-licensed cannabis sector treated the same vote as another month of unequal rules. So did a bipartisan coalition of 35 state and territory attorneys general, who sent Congress a letter on August 4 arguing the ban had “protected consumers, provided much-needed regulatory clarity, and preserved legitimate industrial, agricultural, and nonintoxicating hemp markets.”

The logic is not complicated. A licensed operator pays for a state license, mandatory batch testing, compliance staff, seed-to-sale tracking and state cannabis taxes, then watches a hemp company sell a comparable high through ordinary retail with none of that overhead. From inside a dispensary, November 12 does not look like prohibition. It looks like the end of an arbitrage.

From inside a hemp beverage company, the same date looks like the government erasing a legal business built on a law Congress itself wrote in 2018.

Both pressures are real, and the split helps explain why a clean fix has been so hard. Hemp operators are lobbying to preserve a national market. Prohibition groups and parts of the licensed cannabis world are lobbying for the opposite outcome. That makes for an unusual coalition, even if its members arrived there for entirely different reasons.

4. The Medicare Guy Showed Up

The strangest detail of the week got almost no coverage.

On Friday, Mehmet Oz, who runs the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, urged senators to reject Budd’s amendment. His concern was a program his own agency launched in April.

The Substance Access Beneficiary Engagement Incentive lets providers in certain CMS Innovation Center models consult with Medicare beneficiaries about eligible hemp products for symptom control, and furnish those products at the provider’s own expense, up to $500 per beneficiary per year. Medicare does not pay for them. Five accountable care organizations submitted implementation plans for the first performance period.

So Medicare’s own agency is already in the hemp business, and its administrator spent political capital on a Senate floor fight to keep the new hemp law from gutting it.

Here is the part that makes it coherent rather than merely odd. The CMS program already imposes limits of its own. Eligible products must contain no more than 0.3% delta-9 THC. Oral products cannot exceed 3 milligrams per serving of tetrahydrocannabinols, including delta-8, delta-10 and THCA. Cannabinoids the plant cannot naturally produce are excluded outright.

But the incoming federal standard would cap finished hemp products at 0.4 milligrams per container of total THC, including THCA, plus other cannabinoids with similar effects. That is far below the ceiling CMS currently allows, and it would sharply narrow the universe of products the agency can use in its own demonstration. CMS says it will adjust its eligibility definition if federal hemp law changes.

Budd’s response was the sharpest line anyone landed all week. “Why do unregulated intoxicating edibles need to be available at gas stations for CMS to continue studying hemp-derived pain relief?”

It is a fair question, and it points at what the whole fight keeps failing to separate. The full-spectrum tincture a Medicare patient might get through a CMS demonstration and the 100-milligram gummy sold beside the register at a gas station are governed by the same paragraph of federal law. Most of the proposals on the table are attempts to draw a line the current statute does not draw cleanly. None has gotten a vote.

What Still Has to Happen

The delay is not law. It is one chamber’s position, and the House passed its own funding bill with no hemp language in it at all.

• When the House returns. It has to decide whether to accept the Senate bill, amend it or negotiate something else.
• September 30. Current government funding expires. By then both chambers need to enact identical legislation or the government shuts down.
• November 12. Cannabinoids the plant cannot naturally produce lose federal hemp status regardless. That carve-out survived the Senate untouched.
• December 11. The 0.4-milligram cap and the rest of the new definition arrive, on the same day the Senate’s own funding bill expires.

The states are on their own clocks either way. Illinois restrictions take effect November 12 under state statute, which no federal stopgap touches. North Carolina is weighing legislation that would write the federal standard into state law. For a company whose immediate problem is Illinois, the federal extension does not move the November 12 state deadline.

Budd has already said he will be back.

“We agreed to ban these drugs nearly 9 months ago, but clearly our fight to stop this scourge is just beginning.”

Sen. Ted Budd, R-N.C.

Nine months produced no framework. The Senate has now offered the industry four weeks more than it had on Friday, but the House still has to agree, the administration has reportedly told senators it is done spending capital on extensions, and the opposition runs from Tom Cotton to Jeff Merkley.

Winstanley had it right. A delay is not a destination. It is also, on the current signals, the last one anybody is handing out.

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The Hawaii Senate has passed a pair of resolutions calling on Congress to federally legalize marijuana, support state efforts to clear people’s conviction records and take steps to facilitate access to banking services for companies in the cannabis industry.

“Even though states have made significant policy changes with respect to cannabis, the federal Controlled Substances Act still classifies cannabis as a Schedule I substance,” the measures that were approved in 20-5 votes by the Senate on Thursday say, “which means that medical cannabis dispensaries and other cannabis-related businesses continue to face the prospect of federal seizures, forfeitures, arrests, and other enforcement and prosecution actions.”

The legal recreational cannabis industry could generate more than $1 billion in sales in Hawaii by its fifth year of operation, according to a recent state-commissioned study, the resolutions point out.

Current medical marijuana businesses in the state “are hampered by their inability to obtain the full spectrum of private banking services under federal law,” the measures sponsored by Sen. Joy San Buenaventura (D) say, adding that “arrests and convictions for cannabis possession remain on record and often impact the ability of a person to obtain housing and employment.”

SR58 and SCR64 call on Congress to:

(1) Remove cannabis from the federal Controlled Substances Act;

(2) Provide support to states that are in the process of clearing defendants’ records of cannabis offenses; and

(3) Facilitate access to the full spectrum of banking services for cannabis-related businesses.

The resolutions were approved last week by the Senate Judiciary Committee, which had amended them from their originally introduced form to remove provisions that had noted that alcohol and tobacco don’t fall under the Controlled Substances Act, “even though the regular use of those substances often leads to physical injuries, psychological and social harm, the onset of chronic and fatal illnesses, and other negative impacts on individual and public health.”

Sen. Karl Rhoads (D), the chair of the committee, said that the arguments about other substances “seem irrelevant” to the marijuana resolutions.

The concurrent resolution now heads to the House of Representatives for consideration. The separate Senate resolution simply expresses the sense of that body and requires no further action. It will now be transmitted to President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, as well as the top Democratic and Republican leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate and each member of Hawaii’s congressional delegation. The concurrent resolution will take the same path if approved by the House.

Last week, the Senate Health and Human Services Committee adopted separate resolutions calling on the state attorney general and health department to request an exemption from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) stipulating that Hawaii is permitted to run its medical cannabis program without federal interference.

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Marijuana Moment is tracking hundreds of cannabis, psychedelics and drug policy bills in state legislatures and Congress this year. Patreon supporters pledging at least $25/month get access to our interactive maps, charts and hearing calendar so they don’t miss any developments.

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Although Hawaii senators recently approved a bill to legalize low-dose and low-potency marijuana, the legislation didn’t advance through required steps before a key deadline, and so it is dead for the year.

A separate marijuana legalization bill that contained provisions making the reform contingent on changes to federal law or the state Constitution, SB 2421, was deferred for action. Both Senate and House panels additionally deferred action on a measure to allow for the sale of certain hemp-derived cannabinoid products.

Those actions comes after key House lawmakers signaled that cannabis legalization proposals would not be advancing in the 2026 session, citing a lack of sufficient support in their chamber.

Last month, a Hawaii Senate committee separately passed legislation to allow patients to immediately access medical cannabis once their registrations are submitted, instead of having to wait until their cards are delivered as is the case under current law.

Meanwhile, another Hawaii House committee last week approved a Senate-passed bill that would create a psychedelics task force responsible for studying and making policy recommendations on providing access to breakthrough therapies such as psilocybin and MDMA.

Legislation to allow qualifying patients to access medical marijuana at health facilities also advanced this session.

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The Louisiana Senate has passed a bill to let patients with terminal and irreversible conditions use medical marijuana in hospitals.

The body approved the legislation, SB 270 from Sen. Katrina Jackson-Andrews (D), in a vote of 33-2 on Wednesday. It now heads to the House of Representatives for consideration.

“This bill does exactly what the title says,” Jackson-Andrews said on the floor ahead of the vote. “When a patient is in pain and they believe that therapeutic marijuana will work and have a prescription for it, it allows them to have that prescription delivered to the hospital and administered by one of their family members or themselves.”

Under the proposal, hospitals would have to create written guidelines allowing covered patients to consume medical cannabis on-site in forms other than smoking or vaping.

Under an amendment adopted by a Senate committee earlier this month, emergency or outpatient departments would be exempted from the policy. The revised legislation also clarifies that patients and primary caregivers are responsible for acquiring and administering medical marijuana, which must be “stored securely at all times in a locked container provided by the patient.”

Health care professionals and staff would be prohibited from “administering, storing, retrieving, or assisting the patient with the medical marijuana,” the text says.

The amendment, which the sponsor worked on with help from the Louisiana Hospital Association, also allows hospitals to opt out of the policy if federal officials take action against any healthcare facility in the state over medical cannabis use, rather than only allowing those that were specifically targeted to stop complying.

“This bill was brought at the request of constituents who believe that therapeutic medical marijuana, which is already legal in this state, should be offered in hospitals when patients are terminally ill or otherwise in need the comfort of this medicine,” Jackson-Andrews told the Senate Health and Welfare Committee when the panel took up the legislation.

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Marijuana Moment is tracking hundreds of cannabis, psychedelics and drug policy bills in state legislatures and Congress this year. Patreon supporters pledging at least $25/month get access to our interactive maps, charts and hearing calendar so they don’t miss any developments.

Learn more about our marijuana bill tracker and become a supporter on Patreon to get access.
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Meanwhile in Louisiana, the Senate Health and Welfare Committee recently approved a bill to create a psychedelic-assisted therapy pilot program, using opioid settlement dollars to fund clinical trials aimed at developing alternative treatments such as psilocybin and ibogaine.

Lawmakers are also considering legislation to create an adult-use marijuana legalization pilot program in the state to determine whether the reform should eventually be expanded and permanently codified.

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