Ask HN: Credit card cannot be used for purchasing medical marijuana in Colorado? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Credit card cannot be used for purchasing medical marijuana in Colorado?

An "entrepreneur" approached me to develop a POC of a marketplace for selling medial marijuana in Colorado by accepting payment using Bitcoin. He is saying credit card companies do not allow purchase of "prescribed medical marijuana." All this does not sound right to me. Would be interested in hearing HN community's thoughts on this.

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Yeah, he's right. Lots of dispensaries take credit cards. Most do by flying under the radar or just lying on their application. Some merchant services providers are willing to work knowingly with marijuana businesses, but they are taking a risk doing it.

Getting a card-not-present account (which is what you would want) is even harder. As far as I know nobody has done it in a legit way.

Background: I'm the co-founder of Marvina (https://marvina.com) and I've been trying to figure out payments for almost a year. There's reason to be optimistic, but so far nothing big has broken.

This is the kind of stuff we deal with every day: http://mmjbusinessdaily.com/breaking-mbank-to-close-all-cann...

NPR's Planet Money did a recent podcast on the problems that pot merchants in Colorado and Washington are having when dealing with banks:

Audio: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2015/02/06/384347628/episode-...

Transcript: http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...

It also contrasts the situation in the US with the current banking environment in Canada, which has no such problems dealing with cannabis-oriented businesses.

I used to be involved in the MMJ industry in California. This is very true. Credit card companies are notoriously stand-offish when it comes to cannabis -- most dispensaries in LA have ATMs on premise for this exact reason.

I am by no means an expert on the subject but here's my interpretation:

Since the sale of marijuana is still a federal crime, banks/creditors are not legally allowed to be involved in transactions regarding it.

This right here is the answer, a lot of dispensaries in Denver will have an ATM on premise but it jacks their insurance and it's still not really a good idea, from what I heard they can get in trouble still by having an ATM on site.

Its still a Schedule 1 substance, indicating it has no recognized medical value, and on the other hand, the government owns patents on THC compounds used to shrink tumors.

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